The most important US play this century?
The Inheritance Young Vic
To watch The Inheritance is to move from engaged but detached interest to a state of emotionally shattered but elated awe. Divided into two parts and running to six hours, Matthew Lopez’s American epic of gay lives present and past invites comparison with Tony Kushner’s Nineties masterwork Angels
in America; the astounding thing is it withstands that scrutiny.
It also stands consciously in the shadow of EM Forster’s Howards End (1910): it incorporates elements of the novel, an incarnation of the author and, in Stephen Daldry’s immaculately staged world-premiere, stars Vanessa Redgrave (who was in the 1992 Merchant Ivory film) as the sole female character. She provides the heart-rending pay-off to what instantly looks like a modern classic, perhaps the most important American play of the century so far.
The idea of “inheritance” develops in manifold ways. In the first instance, the emphasis is literary. A young man (whom we will come to identify as an actor named Adam, and also his down-and-out rent-boy doppelganger Leo) is attempting, amid a chorus of thrusty-angsty budding-writer types, to find a route into “his” story about his friends. Enter the stiff Edwardian figure of Forster like a creative-writing fairy-godfather. “Morgan”, as he’s familiarly known, spurs the youth into an act of appropriation. The casual opening line of Howards End – “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister” becomes “One may well begin with Toby’s voicemails” and we get a pungent introductory anecdote about the latter (dashing novelist, Broadway contender) drunkenly heaving his guts over Meryl Streep at a party in the Hamptons.
With Paul Hilton’s “Morgan” encouraging those concerned to dig deeper into themselves, registering with quiet fascination the tactility and sexual freedom unknown to his age of closeted homosexuality, what begins as a larky, camply arch “workshop” draws you into a richly imagined world that has the innate thrill of a page-turner.
The most overt “theft” from the novel concerns the pivotal, thwarted inheritance of a farmhouse owned by the dying Walter (again portrayed by Hilton, loosely the Ruth Wilcox “role” in the book). Walter bequeaths it to the self-doubting, struggling Eric (Kyle Soller) – only for Walter’s deathbed will to be destroyed by his long-term partner: the rich Republican Henry.
The arc of this complex, often waspishly funny and physically uninhibited tale drives towards an understanding that the rustic idyll where Walter once tended to dying, stigmatised, Aids-infected men belongs at a spiritual level to Eric. With its beautiful cherry tree dating back to George Washington, it emblematises the good society America found, in isolated pockets, amid the devastation wrought by the Eighties “plague”, but which must blossom again as the legacy of those years, registered in self-destructive, emotionally self-protective behaviour, lingers cruelly on.
The performances are exquisitely truthful – doubly so from Samuel H Levine as the contrastingly preyed-upon Adam and Leo. Daldry’s fleet, astute production is sparing in its visual elements and “big” moments so that when they land, they land hard.
Part One ends with the heart-rending sight of young men in their prime – the ghosts of those who died after contracting Aids – clustering in silent amity around Eric. Part Two holds back Redgrave’s achingly frail appearance like a final release, yet shows this silver-haired mother, still mourning the gay son she spurned and saw dying, as having found almost none herself. Star ratings are almost beside the point with work of this magnitude but five it is.
Until May 19. Tickets: 020 7922 2922; youngvic.org