The urgency and immediacy that fuels the Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s full-throated, devastating and galvanising play about the first four years of the Aids crisis, is rare in conventional theatre. The form, especially in establishment spaces, can often take too long to hold its fabled mirror up to society and show us who we are. The Normal Heart is all mirror, and it demands you meet its gaze.
When the play made its debut off-Broadway in 1985, the crisis was in full effect. The play’s first set was literally ripped from the headlines: the walls were covered with news stories, quotes and names of people who had died. As the show ran, numbers of the latest total number of cases – prominently displayed – were crossed out and the new number written beneath it. A stage as a living document.
What does it mean to stage the play now in Sydney, where – inevitably – the document has become a historical one? What is the play powered by if not its urgency, its functional need for attention, time and action?
First making its debut in 2022, Dean Bryant’s production now moves to the Sydney Opera House. It’s a full-circle moment for Sydney Theatre Company, which staged the play’s Australian premiere in 1989; today, Mitchell Butel reprises his role as the abrasive, Kramer-inspired Ned Weeks. In 2026, the document has changed, and the production must speak to a new era of unrest.
The Normal Heart is a polemic against inaction; it is also an investigation into how, where and why we choose to use our voices and influence in a time of crisis. Dr Emma Brookner (Emma Jones) has heard that Ned is a writer, well-known and a loudmouth, and urges him to draw attention to a disease she is trying to treat – and to ask gay men to stop having sex in order to save their lives. Ned, faced with friends dying and no government, media or mayoral intervention, knows he must act. He’s abrasive, bullish and exhausting. He’s also righteous.
His fictionalised co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (a real organisation Kramer did indeed co-found), Bruce Niles (Tim Draxl), takes a subtler honey-over-vinegar approach. He’s also closeted; the risks of being outed are real.
The politics of politeness working with the establishment for scraps versus the no-bull urgency of direct action are everywhere in this play, and they are alive in Sydney too right now, as this week’s violent police response to a rally protesting against the visit of the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, hangs heavy over the city. It’s a question many of us are asking anew right now: what will we accept, and what are we willing to do, to bring attention to people who are dying?
Bryant is a director who honours emotional truths and often uses them as fuel; while never ignoring the political, he largely keeps his focus personal. You could best describe this production with words from September 1, 1939, the WH Auden poem that the play’s title comes from: “We must love one another or die.”
Ned’s full-force activism begins just as he is falling in love for the first time with a fashion reporter named Felix (Nicholas Brown); you can find the play’s soul tucked in their moments together, and in the scenes showcasing the fraught but loving relationship between Ned and his straight lawyer brother, Ben (Mark Saturno). There’s a briskness to the production that cuts off scenes before the gut punch; instead, Bryant chooses to linger on moments of human connection.
Brief transitions, created by Bryant, bring the GMHC together at tables of joy and despair, including health columnist and longtime activist Mickey Marcus (Evan Lever) and Tommy Boatwright (Keiynan Lonsdale), as well as Fraser Morrison in a variety of roles. Cellist Rowena Macneish and pianist Michael Griffith play an evolving, mood-altering score composed by Hilary Kleinig that frequently turns to New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle as cultural touchstone and heartbeat. It’s an uneven cast with character arcs that could be clarified, but each actor’s standout scene is a knockout, and that ultimately may be what stays with you.
Ned’s tireless agitation for change was as marred as Kramer’s was by his polarising personality, twinges of ego and quick temper, but being kicked out of the group – which we see dramatised towards the end of the play, after rising tensions and increasingly confronting stoushes – was not the end of his legacy. Bryant has touchingly built in a nod to ACT UP, the world-changing grassroots direct-action organisation Kramer founded just two years after this play was written.
Kramer used his voice to make real change; this production is a reminder that we can and must continue to do the same, for all those who may need it.
The Normal Heart runs at the Sydney Opera House until 14 March
This review was amended on 16 February 2026 to correct the year The Normal Heart was first performed in Australia.
