|
Angels in America |
|
Unity Theatre, Liverpool
Alfred Hickling A Republican White House, revelations of Tory sleaze - it's like the 1980s all over again. There has never been a better time to revive Tony Kushner's immense, dramatic diorama, which encapsulates the age of jogging, Reagan-style Republicanism and Aids. It takes courage, or even folie de grandeur, to revive Angels in America - seven hours of sexually explicit, topically-contentious drama with a huge roll-call of characters, before you even mention the sudden flips into a fourth dimension, Kushner's stage directions calling for "a theatrical kind of magic, with the wires showing - but magic nonetheless". The highest praise one can accord Lee Beagley's production is that it is suffused with both magic and theatricality. But its greatest achievement is to dispel the suspicion that Angels in America is nothing other than a horrible reminder of an era in which we thought legwarmers were a good idea. To gauge the extent of the play's lasting influence, you only have to watch American television. Candid conversations with the dead are a convention of Six Feet Under; catty, sexual candour is the staple of Sex in the City; and sudden spurts of surrealism are already a cliche in Ally McBeal. But the idea that Kushner's work might have dated is emphatically dispelled in a marrow-chilling premonition delivered by the HIV-stricken central character, Prior: "I feel like something terrible is on its way, like a missile from outer space, and its plummeting down towards the earth, and I'm ground zero." What was written as polemic now reads like prophecy. Kushner was writing about Aids in particular, but his play articulates the possibility of human catastrophe in general. The million-dollar question is whether it still entirely justifies its length. Maybe a four-hour highlights package could be extracted, but that would rob this excellent ensemble of the opportunity to explore their characters to an almost novelistic degree. Richard Nutter's Prior seems visibly to lose weight over the course of the action. Not since Peer Gynt has a single play wrapped up a nation's folklore, its moral neuroses and its darkest nightmares in one spectacular theatrical hallucination. Unity Theatre's brilliant vindication proves that Angels in America was not only the greatest play of the 1980s - it is one of the greatest plays of the last century. |