Performers let Angels in America take flight
What is most striking today is the characters’ overriding sense of crisis and despair
Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches (out of 4) By Tony Kushner, directed by Marianne Elliott. Part 2: Perestroika broadcast on Thursday. Cineplex.com or ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Tickets sold out for this revival of Tony Kushner’s landmark 1990s play at London’s National Theatre before it opened in May. If you want to know what the buzz is about, performances are being streamed to selected cinemas and arts venues worldwide, including a number of GTA Cineplexes.
Angels in America became an international talking point when it premiered because of its wildly ambitious form (two plays that together run over seven hours; I’m reviewing the first half, Millennium Approaches) and topical content. It’s set in the mid-1980s in the context of the emerging AIDS crisis and the full bloom of Reagan’s politics, weaving polemical speeches channelling the blister (and long-windedness) of George Bernard Shaw and passages of magic realism into a melodramatic plot structure. It won many awards, including the Pulitzer.
The question for today is continued relevance: while AIDS has become a global pandemic, it no longer represents the immediate and politicized health crisis in the West (and in particular in New York, where the play is set) that it did when first written.
Another element, however, feels unsettlingly of the moment: One of Kushner’s most gutsy imaginative strokes was to make one of his characters the real-life political fixer Roy Cohn, who we now know was a mentor of Donald Trump — a background fact that creates a topical bridge between the play’s time and our own.
“America has discovered itself,” says Roy’s naïve, tortured protégé Joe Pitt, early in the play. “Its sacred position among nations. And people aren’t ashamed like they used to be. This is a great thing. The truth restored.” This Reaganite rhetoric is directly echoed in today’s Trumpism, prompting consideration of the current regime not as a state of exception, but as the extension of a current of America-first individualism.
What is most striking about the play today is the characters’ overriding sense of crisis and despair. Jewish intellectual Louis (James McArdle) is wracked with guilt because he can’t handle his AIDS-infected partner Prior’ (Andrew Garfield) suffering, and eventually bolts (a move that plays into the perils-of-individualism theme).
The lies at the core of Joe (Russell Tovey) and Harper’s (Denise Gough) marriage are revealed as she pops Valium “in wee fistfuls” and he takes ever-longer walks in Central Park. And Roy (Nathan Lane) rages behind the scenes at his doctor about his own AIDS diagnosis: “Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man . . . who f---s around with guys.”
The prime reason to see this new production in any form — live or mediatized — is the performances. Garfield ( Spider-Man, Hacksaw Ridge) puts it all on the line as Prior: Initially the characterization is selfconsciously camp to the point of being distracting, but Garfield quickly brings the audience inside the character’s agonized struggle to cope with this unknown, terrifying disease (“My troubles are lesion,” he puns archly to Louis, pointing to his first Kaposi’s sarcoma).
The Irish actress Gough, a rising star in London theatre, is equally superb as Harper, whose despair at her failing marriage (and the pills) send her on increasingly wild hallucinations which are played as realistically onstage as domestic scenes.
Tovey ( Being Human) is perfectly cast as the earnest, rules-following Republican Mormon Joe: his jour- ney of sexual self-discovery provides a strong emotional backbone.
The beloved American actor Lane ( The Good Wife, The Producers) is always, to some extent, playing himself, but this lends richness and terror to his portrayal of Cohn: he’s quirkily likeable at first, but when he unleashes rage at Joe in a final scene, it’s terrifying.
The Scottish actor McArdle is the only one who seems a bit miscast, straining to deliver Louis’s neurotic qualities. He comes into his own in the extended scene with Prior’s ex Belize (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, wonderful) which allows us to measure the distance we’ve come (or not) over the past 25 years in understanding what “politically correct” means.
It is difficult, seeing this production on screen, to grasp what director Marianne Elliott and designer Ian MacNeil are getting at with his set design.
Scenes are played on a series of small, revolving island platforms that look threadbare; behind and above this, Paule Constable’s lights fleetingly reveal an arched ceiling, perhaps suggesting this is all happening in a church or historic building.
Because the cameras are almost always trained closely on actors’ bodies and faces, we can’t get the bigger picture, and it’s frustrating. Variety’s Matt Trueman suggests that the design in this first half is self-consciously dated and that the concept only pays off in the second half, Perestroika. All the more reason to go along this Thursday and complete the set (both will have encore broadcasts next month).