When did you first realise you were different?
My parents always treated me as a normal child with no oddities. The first time was at kindergarten. I was four years old and we’d just moved back from the States. I went into this room and they all turned round and looked at me a little longer than was strictly necessary and started whispering among themselves in a mean way. Some time later the teacher gave the class a gentle little pep talk: “Mick is different, but please don’t make him think he is.” I remember thinking: “Wtf. What a whacko thing to say.”

You chose acting as a career. Was that actually because of your size or in spite of?
Good question. On the one hand it’s been a thing since I was going through puberty and struggling to overcome a phobia. I was very shy and constantly being stared at, but I also didn’t want people to be looking at me behind my back; I wanted people to look at me for positive reasons, for what I was or for something I was saying or doing. But there was also the fact that I’d been singing and acting since I was a child. I still like fairytales for the morals they contain and for the way they motivate you. You could say a stage represents dream and healing.

Zemlinsky’s opera, with its autobiographical parallels, has the dwarf looking in a mirror at the end and seeing himself as a monster, which leads to his death. What would you say to him to help him?
No one is born a monster; they are made into monsters. It’s his reaction to the courtiers and the Infanta that makes him see himself as a monster. He had been living in a naïve world, not questioning himself, laughing along with everyone else when they’re laughing at him. Zemlinsky did the same: he, too, didn’t question his physical appearance and only sank into depression when Alma Schindler turned him down. The image in the mirror is not the dwarf’s reflection but the stony regard of society.

The opera is called THE DWARF and you play the title role, which refers to a human being, though, not a dwarf. As a person of short stature, what’s your attitude towards the word ‘dwarf’?
It’s common knowledge that dwarfs are mythical figures in fairytales. People used to call short-statured people – and continue to call them – dwarfs and Lilliputians as a way of dehumanising them. Obviously I’ve played characters from fairytales, that’s to say dwarfs, but it would never occur to me to use that label for myself. Dwarf, gnome and Lilliputian are all tags that are specifically otherist in the truest sense of the word: they’re different species. I call myself a person.

Alma Mahler was quite open in rejecting Zemlinsky as ugly, Jewish and gnarled. Surely that’s the much sadder story here, because it was fact, not fiction. The story is mentioned in the prelude to the production.
Absolutely. At one point in the opera you see me as the dwarf conducting the orchestra to the “Song of the Bleeding Orange”. The aria is a distillation of everything - the opera, and the hurt that Zemlinsky feels, too. Every time I do it, I feel the hurt. In real life, though, Zemlinsky dealt with his pain. His heart may have been broken, but all the main people in his life featured as characters in the works he composed. He uses art to work through his pain. That’s what makes him stand tall!

THE DWARF alludes to the ugliness and brutality of 1920s society. How much of that is present in today’s society?
It’s even more present. Our mirrors today are Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. So much damage is done to the self-image of young people on those platforms. Our feelings of self-worth are more and more reliant on people’s responses to selfies that we post as reflections of ourselves to be judged.

What causes people more pain: laughter or hatred?
Hatred. People can be laughing for a range of reasons. They might even be laughing because of misunderstandings that they want to clear up and laughing with other people at themselves. But hatred is dangerous.