Two big questions surround this revival of Tony Kushner’s epic, two-part “gay fantasia on national themes”, which is beautifully staged by Marianne Elliott and boasts a starry cast headed by Nathan Lane and Andrew Garfield.
First: do these two plays justify their formidable eight-hour length? The answer is a qualified yes. Second: written in the early 1990s, do they come across as a fascinating period document, or something that speaks to us today? The answer is, a bit of both.
In the tighter, tauter first play, Millennium Approaches, Kushner certainly captures the fear and uncertainty caused by the Aids crisis: this is 1985, and many of the characters are in a state of sexual denial.
The most vividly drawn is the power-broking lawyer, Roy Cohn, who rejects the label of homosexual on the grounds that they are men who have “zero clout”. But both Joe Pitt, a married Mormon, and his Valium-addicted wife are unable to openly acknowledge the fact that Joe is gay.
Louis, a word-processing Jewish clerk, also flees in terror when he believes his lover, Prior Walter, to be dying of Aids. Almost the only character who is fully honest about his sexuality is Prior himself, confronting mortality with whatever courage he can muster. Prejudice and homophobia still exist but, watching the first play, one is reminded how much has changed since it was written in terms of gay rights, sexual openness and HIV-testing.
If progress has been made in some areas, however, Kushner’s apocalyptic view of American politics now looks amply justified. The action takes place at the start of Reagan’s second term, and in one scene a justice department official exults in the possibilities ahead: “It’s really the end of liberalism. The end of New Deal socialism. The end of ipso facto secular humanism. The dawning of a genuinely American political personality.”
Even allowing for the intervening presidencies of Clinton and Obama, this has a chilling resonance today; and it comes as no surprise to learn that the corrupt Cohn acted as Donald Trump’s legal adviser for a decade.
But what really hits one is the expansiveness of Kushner’s imagination and the rich opportunities he creates for actors. Lane, seen previously on the London stage as Max Bialystock in The Producers, is magnetic as Cohn, creating a figure who is part predator, part patriarch but, above all, a victim of his own sad delusions about the significance of power. Meanwhile, Garfield as Prior excellently combines a head-tossing, period-style camp with the desperate anguish of a man craving love in his hour of need.
James McArdle has just the right guilt-ridden charisma as his defecting lover, Louis, while Russell Tovey as a closeted Mormon and Denise Gough as his tormented wife exactly convey the agonies of a marriage mired in lies and self-deception.
After this, the four-hour second play, Perestroika, seems wilder, stranger, more surreal. I have to admit that Kushner loses me when he introduces angels into the action, even if their function is to suggest that they have been deserted by God, are doomed to inertia and that it is up to mankind to sort out its problems. Elliott stages the idea of angelic intervention ingeniously, with Amanda Lawrence appearing with spreadeagled wings and supported by a group of spectral shadows. But the writing gets woollier the further Kushner strays from the recognisable and the earth-bound.
The best scenes in Perestroika are those that follow the fortunes of the characters we have come to know. Lane’s Cohn remains the embodiment of bullying, power-hungry manipulativeness, but we almost come to pity him as he rages against encroaching death. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Belize, the one-time drag queen who becomes Cohn’s night nurse, touchingly suggests a certain compassion for a man whose politics he loathes.
The character who develops most in the second play is Garfield’s Prior Walter. Having narrowly escaped death, he haunts the action with his long, pale face and black cloak and towards the end comes to embody the urge to live and the painful progress that seems the best hope for the human race. Garfield also establishes a close bond with the unlikely figure of a Mormon matriarch, whom Susan Brown, among myriad other roles, portrays with a puzzled kindliness.
There are passages of wonderful writing in both plays. There are also some good jokes, as when Cohn, who sent the Ethel Rosenberg of history to her death, delights in the fact that her reincarnation is chanting over his hospitalised body: “I finally wanted to see,” he says, “if I could make Ethel Rosenberg sing.” There are also times, especially in Perestroika, when you feel, as one character says, that too much imagination is dangerous and can blow up in your face.
What is one left with at the end of eight hours? Some memorable images, thanks to Ian MacNeil’s design. Some astonishing performances from a very good cast. But the prime impression is of Kushner’s conviction that, although we live in dark times where both God and Marx are dead, there is always hope in the instinct for survival and the tenacity of the human spirit.
- Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is at the National Theatre, London, until 19 August
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