Talking with Dino Fetscher about his role in ‘The Normal Heart’ (still playing at the National until 6th, so get quickly out there to see it!) and the importance of the play in this cultural moment.
Poor Dino had just moved home, so was propped up against kitchen cabinets, surveying a mass of boxes. Moving home is stressful, I commiserate as I look at the unenviable task of making a space a home. He is going from the emotional and exhausting run at the National to a new top secret television job, but ‘so grateful’ that he is working. Like many actors, the fragility of an acting career was a risk you took pre covid, but since covid, the knowledge that it can all go suddenly wrong makes the urgency of theatre a carpe diem time.
‘It is incredible how ignorant I was about queer history,’ he said, ‘as a gay man, I still had no idea.’ We are talking about the wealth of drama that has come out in recent years, reflecting the time of the HIV pandemic. What is it about now that makes it a time for this reflection? ‘The Inheritance’ made me realise how little I knew about what had happened in the 1980s and how that had affected the gay community. It is a period of history that has largely been ignored until now. Dino agreed that it was not just me, but most people had little to no idea of life for this section of the population. ‘It was a huge failing in society,’ he commented regarding the inequalities of treatment. ‘There was a total lack of political will to do anything. Reagan was ‘unalterably opposed’ to anything that would have been seen as support for the gay community,’ he paraphrases from the play. And this despite one of his key staffers dying from AIDS. By 1984, AIDS had already affected at least 7,700 people and killed more than 3500 in the US. Reagan did not even publicly mention it until September 1985 (the year this play was first performed in the UK). ‘Which is why,’ Dino commented, ‘characters like Emma and Ned need to be direct, abrasive and extreme. We can look back now and say we would have done things differently, but they were facing this wall and had to get heard. They needed these personalities to affect change.’
Certainly some people have found Kramer too didactic. Ned, his autobiographical other self, is a difficult man to like and the character spends too much time hammering home his message loudly for this to be an easy play. But the message, says Dino, is still just as important. ‘It helps us be better.’ So much science has come out of the HIV crisis: viral load counting and vaccine trialling with all their databases owe a debt to HIV. But HIV is still dealt with treatment rather than vaccinations. We talk about how fast the covid vaccines came out. ‘We had a talk from an HIV doctor,’ Dino says, ‘and he compared the covid vaccine and HIV vaccine idea to St Paul’s Cathedral and a stick tent.’ Because HIV is more complex? I ask. ‘Exactly so, which is why no vaccine, yet.’
The 1970s were a time of sexual liberation and the idea of freedom to be, did this make the 1980s a time of paying the cost? ‘No,’ Dino says emphatically. ‘Sex was a political expression in the 1970s, but sexual nature is something that is built into us. It’s foolish to say ‘stop having sex,’ that doesn’t work. But we are better at self-love now and therefore have moved to ideas of teaching safer sex.’ But there is a correlation between behaviour and some diseases, I suggest, being a little devil’s advocate? ‘There is in terms of the statistics, for sure, but the issue with HIV is the attached stigma.’
This is when it gets more personal for Dino. Although the antiretroviral medicines have been available since he came out, ‘The terror was palpable,’ he says. Fear of HIV drove more to safer sexual practices and caused more to take better care of their health, but it is ‘an anxiety you live with, even as someone well educated about it. The level of shame is deeply rooted.’
The heart-breaking death scene in the hospital was hard to prepare for. ‘It 100% could have been me, or my friends,’ Dino admits. If he had been there at that time, with the lack of advice and people too scared to commit to advice, there are so many ifs. It is a profound moment when you realise that you escaped something others fell prey to. ‘We are fallible’ which is why even the characters of ‘The Normal Heart’ can’t agree on the way forward or the best way to help each other, stuck as they are in the early 80s.
How did he prepare for this character? ‘I did imaginative work with the director and researched into the background, where he is from. And then in the rehearsal room I built up this bond with Ben (Daniels, playing Ned).’ You could see that bond clearly, I tell him, the pathos of the scene stays with me. It is the scene that grounds the play – one relationship shows the pain of the crisis all around. Because love is the stuff that matters.
Photographs from Cameron Slater, used with permission.
