What a sadly but seamlessly relevant play Tony Kushner’s two-part, Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Angels in America continues to be, 35 years after it was premiered in San Francisco. Produced when the memory of the HIV crisis was still fresh, raw and ongoing, it’s brought to life here with palpable, captivating power and quality in this new five-hour version at Edinburgh International Festival by director Ivo Van Hove and Internationaal Theater Amsterdam.
Presented in Dutch with English supertitles against Jan Versweyveld’s stark, almost factory-like background, with the music of David Bowie either tinnily crackling in the background like a shop radio or blasting out at full volume (both are dissociating stylistic choices), the sprawling production focuses on a real-life American despot. The domineering, thoroughly conservative New York lawyer Roy Cohn (brilliantly played by Hans Kesting) acts like he can shape reality through willpower and lawsuits alone, declaring himself not gay but merely a straight man who has sex with men.
Coming into Cohn’s orbit are functionary Joe, a committed Mormon and Republican, and his wife Harper, who go on their own respective sexual and spiritual journeys, and sometime drag queen Prior Walter and his boyfriend Louis, the former with AIDS and the latter in denial. As the disease takes hold of both Roy and Prior against a backdrop of personal and societal uncertainty, all the good and bad of the American Dream is demonstrated here, from fear and selfishness to a resounding sense of hope and compassion.
Angels in America, King’s Theatre, run ended