Epic ‘Angels’
The theatrical event of the year opens at the National
The theatrical event of the year is currently under way at the National Theatre – a revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, starring Hollywood actor Andrew Garfield, Broadway veteran Nathan Lane and Denise Gough, currently Britain’s most in-demand stage actress. It’s directed by Marianne Elliott, who was responsible for two of the National’s biggest-ever transfers, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and War Horse.
Angels in America is a seven-hour epic, focusing on the Aids crisis of the Eighties, and is now considered a modern classic of American drama. (It won Kushner a Pulitzer prize.) However, it was the UK that gave the work its first major production – initially just the first play, Millennium Approaches, in 1992, and then in a pairing with the second, Perestroika.
“I knew as soon as I read the first page that I had to put it on,” says Richard Eyre, who was artistic director of the National at the time. “It was by such a long way more ambitious than anything that I had seen in British theatre. It was about politics, it was about millennium fears, it was about sexuality, it was about Aids, it was about God and it was about angels, and all of these issues came together with an extraordinary prescience.”
For those who have never seen it, or the 2003 HBO adaptation starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson, the plot focuses on two couples. Louis is a clever New York Jew whose lover, Prior, is dying of Aids and experiences prophetic visions, including visits from an angel who tries to persuade him to accept his fate and give up his battle against the disease.
Meanwhile, the closeted Mormon Joe Pitt (Louis’s co-worker) is struggling to keep his marriage to his neurotic wife, Harper, afloat.
The other main character is Roy Cohn, a real-life attorney who had served as Senator McCarthy’s chief counsel during the witch-hunts of the Fifties and was Donald Trump’s lawyer – and mentor – during the Seventies and Eighties. A brutal, self-serving narcissist, he has hidden his homosexuality his whole life, but is now dying of Aids and uses his influence to obtain a stash of the experimental drug AZT.
Actor Sean Chapman played Prior in the National’s 1992 production. It opened at the Cottesloe (now the Dorfman) on January 23 and Chapman, who was then 30, recalls the extraordinary effect it had on audiences.
“It exploded into an incredibly receptive world. It was like doing the FA Cup final every night. I knew people had bought tickets from New York and had flown over. Even though the National’s fire regulations were stringent, there were people crammed at the back of the Cottesloe and leaning over the bannisters. The atmosphere became incredibly intense, and there was a high level of expectation after the first reviews came out.”
Those reviews were uniformly strong. “While it is certain to shock people, there is no denying the drama’s theatrical power,” wrote the
Telegraph’s theatre critic Charles Spencer. “Throughout, you are never in any doubt that Kushner is a highly individual talent, with his imagination working at full stretch. As a result, the play is as exhilarating as it is harrowing.”
There was still hysteria about Aids in the UK in 1992 and, as Eyre points out, “a feeling among heterosexual fascists that Aids was a punishment that had been sent justly to punish the gay sinners. Additionally, the play arrived not long after the government’s enforcement of Clause 28, [part of a Bill] which outlawed the propagation of homosexuality.”
Kushner’s play sent audience members away more open-hearted, re-examining their attitudes towards those who live outside societal norms.
Not that Kushner was compassionate towards the play’s own cast and crew. The writer had a reputation as a hard taskmaster. The director, Declan Donnellan, and his partner Nick Ormerod, the production’s designer, once returned home to find it covered in paper. They thought they had been burgled until they realised that Kushner had sent fax after fax detailing ideas for how to improve the play.
“Tony is neurotic and a worrier and extremely fastidious, but justifiably so,” says Eyre. “Declan would say he was over-motherly, but I warmed to him. I thought he was a remarkable man and a remarkable writer and we’ve stayed in touch ever since.”
For Chapman, learning the dialogue and watching the clever complex curves of Kushner’s mind was a joy. “He was like a new Arthur Miller, the depth of his cultural knowledge was so enormous. The brilliant stroke of Kushner was that you thought you were going to watch someone’s decline, but what you got instead was three hours of resistance to that decline.”
Such was the success of the first production that plans were quickly made to revive it and introduce Part Two. Chapman and many of the original cast members were asked to return, but he (and several others, including Henry Goodman, who played Cohn) declined. For Chapman, 1992 had been an emotional year, both professionally and personally (he had just had his first child), and he did not want to try to replicate the success of the first production. There was also the problem that
Perestroika was felt by many to be inferior to the first play, too keen to supplant scabrous humour and emotional truth with whimsicality. Chapman agrees and admits he threw the script for Perestroika across the room when he read it. Whether Marianne Elliott’s new production can surmount the disparity in quality between the two parts remains to be seen.
While Aids is no longer met with the same fear that it was in 1992, Angels
in America still resonates. For UK audiences, it is a cogent response to prejudice, whether that be towards gay people or any other group of “outsiders”. Despite its epic canvas,
Angels in America is, essentially, a play about tolerance.
The unflattering way in which Roy Cohn is portrayed also adds a certain frisson, bearing in mind the influence that he had on the current president of the United States.
Eyre believes that the work is just as relevant in 2017. “It has such an intelligent political analysis of the Right, and of the strain in American thinking that is alarmingly current. When Angels premiered, we thought there was a progress towards greater sexual liberty and social justice. How wrong we were.”
Chapman, for his part, believes the new production could still change people’s attitude towards homosexuality, as it did in 1992.
“One night, I was at the National Theatre bar after a performance,” he recalls, “and a guy came up to me in a suit, pretty much a sponsor-type figure. He said: ‘I just want to say that I always knew gay men had sex. I just didn’t realise that they could love each other.’ ”
Angels in America is currently sold out but you may be able to obtain tickets via ballots that close on May 24 and June 28. It will be screened in cinemas on July 20 (Part One) and July 27 (Part Two). Visit nationaltheatre.org.uk for details
‘It was by such a long way more ambitious than anything that I had seen in British theatre’