The National’s revival of The Normal Heart, then, benefits from a sort of serendipity: in the 35 years since its original writer Larry Kramer’s play was last given a major London production, there has never been more mainstream interest.īorn out of the epidemic’s tumultuous early years which drove Kramer – a mercurial figure variously cast as a puritan with a chip on his shoulder and a hero of gay politics – to fabricate it in a flurry of rage, The Normal Heart is a difficult artistic proposition.

The impact of It’s a Sin, particularly, has been hailed: Danny Beales from the National AIDS Trust went so far as to write “finally, HIV is on the agenda” in regards to the show, and myriad columnists celebrated its educational merits. Davies’ TV melodrama It’s a Sin Matthew Lopez’s play, The Inheritance, which just swept the Tony Awards, and Robin Campillo’s film 120BPM. Since 2018, three new major works across media have helped to reinvigorate interest in the west’s historical epidemics, not least in New York City and London: Russell T. The AIDS pandemic is very much an ongoing public health crisis and continues to kill millions each year, the lion’s share being in the Global South. As it cracks and flickers breaking through the darkness, a minute of silence is held.

Once on stage, a fire is lit in the middle of the round, a sort of funeral pyre. Inside is a flurry of paper totems with names – old, young, celebrated, unknown – connected by many things, but not least pathological tragedy: all of them died from AIDS-related complications, sourced from the AIDS Memorial Instagram account. Before the lights go down at The National Theatre, and the performers of The Normal Heart arrange themselves across the Olivier’s Stage frozen in the throes of dance, one of the cast members fishes their hand into a hat.

The normal heart by larry kramer