In the 1980s the Jewish activist and playwright Larry Kramer almost single handedly forced the United States government to recognise AIDS as a public health emergency. As people died around him Kramer took on official inertia, indifference and downright homophobia too.
He died last year at the age of 84 in the teeth of another health emergency, the Covid pandemic. The cause of death was reportedly pneumonia but he lived long enough to see the now famous head of the America’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr Anthony Fauci fight Trump’s reluctance to take Coronavirus seriously, just as Kramer fought Reagan who ignored HIV for years.
There was irony in this because in the 1980s Fauci was one of the health officials Kramer railed at. The became friendly later. But it was that capacity for mountain-moving fury, matched by a monumental humanity that drove Kramer’s campaign and was also the impulse behind his 1985 autobiographical play.
In Dominic Cooke’s gripping revival Ben Daniels terrifically embodies both qualities as Kramer’s alter ego Ned Weeks. Over a fast-moving two hours and 40 minutes the play charts the two-steps-forward-one-step- back process of getting the world to notice the emergency that was unfolding in plain sight.
The arguments deployed by Weeks often invoke Holocaust imagery. So deaf are even members of his own gay community to his warnings he likens them to Jews who were in denial about the threat they faced before and during the Holocaust.
“Is this how so many people walked into the gas chambers?” he rages to his lover Felix (Dino Fetscher), a New York Times journalist who refuses to make waves, and draw attention to his sexuality, by asking his paper to write about the mysterious new disease.
The play lurches along its timeline with the cast occasionally dropping out of character to declare dates. The first is July 1981. The location is the surgery of polio survivor Dr Emma Brookner played by the perfectly cast Silent Witness actor Liz Carr who having the debilitating disease AMC brings her own wheelchair to the role.
The straight-talking Brookner conscripts Weeks for his reputation as a fearless loudmouth when it comes to gay rights. Or indeed anything. And so begins his mission to stop his dead and dying peers from being invisible.
The play can be declamatory at times. There are grandstanding, Miller-esque speeches, only not quite as good. And the tug of the plot’s progression through the 1980s is a bit like being yanked through someone’s diary. But the acting is as good as it could possibly be and the relationships are beautifully observed.
Daniels gets excellent support, particularly from Fetscher as Ned’s lover Felix, a relationship forged in the heat of Weeks angrily comparing the indifference of heterosexuals to gay suffering to that of gentiles about the persecution of Jews. “What kind of date is this?”, asks Felix.
Also excellent is Robert Bowman as Ned’s loving, straight brother Ben whose inability to see his brother’s life as valid as his own results in a wrenching fissure. The loss that causes their reunion is devastating.
