Theatre: The Inheritance CDS of the week: three new releases

Young Vic, The Cut, London SE1 (020-7922 2922). Until 19 May Running time: part 1, 3hrs 20mins; part 2, 3hrs 35mins Brahms: The Symphonies, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, cond. Robin Ticciati

To watch Matthew Lopez’s dazzling two-part, seven-hour play, is to “pass from engaged but detached interest into a realm of total absorption before arriving at a state of emotionally shattered but elated awe”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. The Inheritance – given its world premiere in this immaculate production by Stephen Daldry – is an American epic of gay men’s lives past and present, inspired (explicitly) by E.M. Forster’s Howards End. It’s an engrossing “theatrical marathon” that instantly emerges as a modern classic; “perhaps the most important American play of the century so far”. All the more stunning is that a dramatic work so unabashed in its political commitments always “makes you feel you’re living and breathing the issues”, but never being lectured on them.

Although basing his play around an interlocking group of six gay men, Lopez sticks closely to the plotting and themes of Forster’s masterpiece, said Holly Williams on What’s On Stage. This is a grand saga (with all the “soapy addictiveness” of a “Netflix binge”) about the battle between liberal idealism and the individual; about what it means to live a purposeful life; and – in Lopez’s “super-smart” telling – the historic silencing of gay voices and gay art. The piece “sweeps you up completely” and the whole cast shine – above all Kyle Soller, who plays the hero, Eric, with tremendous warmth and generosity. Andrew Burnap as his “fabulously vain” writer lover is also superb. And Vanessa Redgrave, in a late cameo, turns what might have seemed a “glib intertextual reference” to the film of Howards End into something “strangely, sadly luminous”.

Comparisons with Tony Kushner’s modern epic Angels in America are inevitable – and justified, said Henry Hitchings in the London Evening Standard. But The Inheritance has a “bruising seriousness and salty charisma that are very much its own”. It’s not flawless, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. At times you feel Lopez is papering over a few cracks with “good jokes” and speedy pacing. Yet he does “pull something transcendent out of the bag – a vision of a long, sad tragedy, of an inheritance lost”. This is a “monumental achievement”.