Marianne Elliott (2017)

The full title of Tony Kushner’s famous pair of plays is Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.  In a short interview that formed part of the introduction to the live broadcast in cinemas of the current National Theatre revival, Kushner was likeably sheepish about the pretentiousness of the words after the colon.  But ‘fantasia’ is a fair description of his dramatic method and ‘national themes’ is right enough too:  more than a quarter-century on from the first productions of Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, their rich frame of cultural reference and sense of political urgency continue to impress.  Angels in America, as well as being theatrically inventive, is an amazingly sustained and vigorous piece of writing.

It’s also very long.  The total running time of the two plays in the new National production is a little over 390 minutes (around three hours for the first play, broadcast on 20 July, and three and a half for the second, broadcast on 27 July), excluding intervals of thirty minutes per play.  Especially during the closing third of Millennium Approaches and the first third of Perestroika, I began to feel that Kushner, borne along by the abundant fluency of his dialogue, was elaborating rather than developing themes and describing the characters’ relationships at excessive length.  The HBO TV miniseries of 2003, the only form in which I’d seen Angels in America previously, wasn’t greatly abbreviated (total running time of 352 minutes) but the division into six episodes made for easier viewing.   It may have been different from the Lyttelton Theatre auditorium but, in the small space of Curzon Richmond and with the actors often in close-up, the insistent passion of the piece was sometimes alienating:  I felt I was being lectured and wanted to distance myself from that.  This is why I particularly enjoyed a scene late in Millennium Approaches that sends up the opinionated garrulity of Louis Ironson.  Because the character of Louis seems to be Tony Kushner’s alter ego, this comes over as a virtual acknowledgement of a more general tendency in the play.

Marianne Elliott’s staging for the National nevertheless reflects full and understandable confidence in Kushner’s text.  Elliott also engages enthusiastically and intelligently with the magic realism of Angels in America:  the special effects for the plays’ surreal and fantastic elements are rationed enough to keep them special.  In spite of the reservations expressed above, it was a heartening pleasure to see a thoroughly admirable piece of theatre – albeit in the cinema!  The colossal demands made on the cast return you to the most primitive, wondering reactions to stage acting – where do they get the energy, how do they remember all those lines?   All eight cast members have at least two characters – the total number of roles is approaching thirty – although, with one exception, I’ll mention below only the main role that each actor plays.

As the AIDS patient Prior Walter, Andrew Garfield has the opportunity to demonstrate his flair for eccentricity much more than his recent film roles have allowed.  His athleticism, gestural definition, vocal wit and sheer likeability are a spectacular and affecting combination.  Nathan Lane may be more celebrated for his work in theatre than on screen but, however close the camera gets here, it doesn’t detect the slightest falsity in his portrait of the terminally ill Roy Cohn.  It’s remarkable too – given the limitations of Cohn’s personality, at least as Tony Kushner has written this based-on-a-real-person role – how often Lane takes you by surprise.  He has a great vicious pugnacity.  James McArdle’s achievement as chatterbox Louis is hardly less extraordinary.  McArdle has loads to say yet his words are always convincingly in character.   He’s especially striking when, just occasionally, the verbal flow suddenly stops and he shows us Louis’s mind rather than his mouth working.

The actors playing the Mormon couple – the successful young lawyer Joe Pitt and his agoraphobic wife Harper – have challenges of a different kind.  Tony Kushner has to work harder to bring this pair to full theatrical life.  For a start, their modus loquendi is less engagingly idiosyncratic than that of Prior, Louis, Roy Cohn and Belize – the former drag queen, ex-boyfriend of Prior and now nurse to Cohn:  it’s harder for Joe and Harper not to become vocally monotonous.   The Pitts aren’t tragicomic monsters as Cohn is; nor does Kushner empathise with them as he does with Prior, Louis or Belize.  Perhaps because he has for so long suppressed his sexuality, the tortured closet gay Joe is the least kindly treated character in Angels in America (including Roy Cohn, who has refuted his homosexual nature rather differently).   Joe is finally ignored:  the closing, healing scene in Central Park features Prior, Louis, Belize and Joe’s mother, Hannah.  Her son is conspicuous by his absence.

There are times in Millennium Approaches when Russell Tovey, in his committed playing of Joe, seems to be, rather than inside his character, expressing compassion for him.  But Tovey is powerful and moving in Perestroika when Joe has fallen for Louis and is desperate to throw off his inhibitions.  Denise Gough is compelling but the strength and intelligence this actress radiates are somehow at odds with Harper Pitt’s vulnerability.  Harper may have Valium-induced hallucinations but Gough, though she plays the role sympathetically, has an illusionless quality:  as a result, the gradual process of Harper’s apprehending her husband’s homosexuality feels like a dramatic contrivance.   Gough reads her final monologue beautifully.  Overall, though, she lacks the shadings that Mary-Louise Parker gave Harper in the HBO miniseries.

Susan Brown has the larger disadvantage of playing the several characters that Meryl Streep played in the screen version of Angels.  Brown also does Roy Cohn’s doctor and ‘the world’s oldest living Bolshevik’, which Streep didn’t.  Brown often seems to lack the vocal colour and emotional agility needed for her formidable assignment:  she’s actually better doing the monologues of male characters – especially the hectoring, relentless Bolshevik – than she is as the slyly vengeful, insinuating ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who regularly appears at Roy Cohn’s deathbed.  In her early scenes as Hannah Pitt, Brown is stridently one-note but things change once Hannah, having travelled to New York City from her home in Utah, makes the acquaintance of Prior.  Susan Brown stops declaiming and starts connecting with Andrew Garfield:  her characterisation of Hannah blooms touchingly in the closing stages.  Nathan Stewart-Jarrett is stylishly entertaining as Belize and Amanda Lawrence impressively bizarre as the principal Angel.

The terrestrial action takes place, except for the five-years-later epilogue to Perestroika, in 1985 and 1986.  Anger at the Reagan administration’s attitude towards the AIDS epidemic is a major driving force of the plays. In spite of its historical specificity, Angels in America isn’t, however, a period piece in the pejorative sense of the term:  Marianne Elliott’s fine production attests to its lasting substance and potency.  Even so, it’s rather startling to realise, when Louis makes a disparaging mark about ‘Bush’, that he’s talking about the older George Bush – whom the liberal-minded, at this distance in time, have come to think of almost as the ‘good’ Bush.  If you look up Roy Cohn on Wikipedia today, he’s introduced as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s (when Cohn, remarkably, was only in his mid-twenties) but you don’t read far before learning that he also represented Donald Trump during the latter’s early business career.  Tony Kushner asserts in Angels in America that God and Marxism are things of the past.  All the more sobering, then, that his plays evoke a time that was dark but also more hopeful than now.

20 and 27 July 2017