Angels in London

It’s more than eight hours long and packed with the cream of British acting talent — so no wonder everybody’s talking about Angels in America. But how much do you know about the theatrical event of the season? Phoebe Luckhurst presents a user’s guide

LONDON theatre has assumed Herculean proportions. The highestprofile plays are bombastic, hours-long affairs, that sell out online in hours with the same frenzy reserved for Glastonbury.

The latest example is Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s pioneering play about the Aids crisis in Eighties America. Previews have been running for weeks and now the play opens officially on Thursday. This is what you need to know.

Long story short

The play, which has the full title Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, received its world premiere in San Francisco in 1991. It’s a devastating meditation on the Aids crisis. Throughout, characters return as “angels” or “ghosts”, and it handles political questions about experimental drug treatment and the ostracisation of the homosexual community amid the repressive conservatism of Reagan-era America. Initially it focuses on a gay couple, Prior Walter and Louis Ironson, in Manhattan, though it weaves in the storylines of other characters — a device that expresses the closeness of the gay scene in New York in the Eighties, a situation which charged the terror about the spread of Aids.

The play is set in two parts which can be performed separately: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. It was adapted for HBO in 2003, and has also been turned into an opera by Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös. Part one was first performed at the National Theatre in 1992, directed by Declan Donnellan, and transferred to Broadway the following year. Perestroika had its London premiere in 1993 at the National, in rep with Millennium Approaches.

The National stage

This round of performances officially opens next Thursday, though previews have been running for a few