It’s one of the
biggest plays of the late twentieth century, perhaps one of the last entries in
the American canon, one of the newest classics, and it’s not without its own
kind of grandeur. Written as two plays, and billed as “an epic double-comedy of love and hate,
heaven and earth, past and future,” Tony Kushner’s Angels
in America is set in 1985, and revolves around a group of “marginalised
individuals in New York in the last years of the Cold War,” as the AIDS
epidemic sweeps them all up in its path. To see the two plays in sequence on
consecutive days is by turns compelling and grueling, and I don’t think it
would be any easier seeing them on the same day.
Staged within a beige-tiled
atrium, Angels in America is directed
with a vitality and cleverness by Eamon Flack, and to use a character’s
analogy, it’s all a bit like an octopus with its eight arms waving about,
trying to keep track of every character, every actor, each plotline, and still
keep everything in the scope of the bigger picture. Now a generation old (as a
complete play, it is a year or two younger than I am), whether you realise it
or not, it’s “actually a play about the beginning of the era we’re now in the
thick of.”
