Heavenly acting makes hours fly by
Angels in America National’s Lyttelton Theatre
Tony Kushner’s intellectually dazzling, quirky, often downright bizarre Nineties two-part epic has, embedded at its mid-way point – at the climax to “Millennium Approaches” – the most outlandish coup de théâtre of recent times: an angel crashing through the apartment ceiling where hunches, sickened to the marrow by Aids and quivering in terror, Prior Walter, hero of this exhaustive dramatic marathon.
What does the National Theatre’s revival – 25 years on, or thereabouts, from its pivotal London premieres of 1992-3 – offer the gifted Andrew Garfield, giving one of the performances of his career as Prior, his Spiderman credentials alone making you anticipate an aptly blockbuster moment? Scuttling figures in black and a just-about-gainly hoisting of Amanda Lawrence’s shock-wigged seraph, tattered white wings crudely manipulated into heaving motions on either side – human puppetry. Shouldn’t something so celestial, like, take your breath away?
“Very Steven Spielberg” is the gag (one of countless gems that Kushner crowbars into his highly portentous but never pompous vision of epochal upset) – but here “Very War Horse” would be more appropriate; small wonder, given that show’s director Marianne Elliott has taken charge.
I don’t mean to sound too gripey. The show’s a start-to-finish sensation, but if I have a reservation about a production that’s box-office dynamite, it’s that there’s not quite enough TNT in the visuals, at least in the first half. Ian MacNeil’s set, with itty-bitty, neon-lined chunks of interior, efficiently wings us around New York, and other increasingly hallucinogenic locales including Antarctica, yet there’s an air of “will this do?”.
The performances and the plays themselves, however, absolutely fly. Angels will serve as a fascinating (if Leftist-slanted) history lesson for the young. We’re reminded of the Reagan era, embodied most viciously in the closeted (also dying of Aids) figure of legal power-player Roy M Cohn (the superb Nathan Lane). The collapse of Communism is marked in Part Two (Perestroika). Yet this isn’t yesterday’s news: the core themes, about the price paid for denial, and the cost of change and acceptance, the end-times sense of foreboding many feel about the state of the planet still pulse with urgency.
Garfield is boyishly intense, and intensely pitiable, as the young man whose mask of camp affectation slips to reveal howling, febrile despair as mortal dread seizes. And all around him, the cast do forensic justice to the atomised personalities and personal crises from which Kushner’s absurdly ambitious state-of-the-nation “gay fantasia” is exquisitely constructed.
Once again Denise Gough excels at the NT, this time as a valium-addicted housewife reeling from the realisation that her Mormon husband (Russell Tovey, all-American, all-anguished) is gay; James McArdle makes Prior’s faithless boyfriend garrulously guilt-ridden; and watch out for Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as the drolly nononsense former drag queen turned caring nurse. You could get to New York in the time it takes to watch this. Thus triumphantly served, though, it’s near on eight hours thoroughly and memorably well spent.