Angels

When Tony Kushner’s Angels in America came to the National Theatre in 1992, I was swept up in its vast exhilarating, swooping scope: the AIDS crisis, Reaganism, gay life in and out of the closet, the hole in the ozone layer, magical realism (though I didn’t know then to name it so), political and personal responsibility and irresponsibility... Unconnected things that somehow, in Kushner’s sparkly phantasmagorical otherworld, became wholly connected. I never completely caught my breath and really wanted to see its revival 25 years on.
 
What time does... Aids is no longer a plague, the consequences of Reagansim still infect our lives but the origins have become history, sexuality is much more readily talked about and more easily not talked about, our obsession with the hole in the ozone layer feels almost quaint now that we’re boiling the whole planet, political irresponsibility stalks the globe on a scale that would probably have astonished even Roy Cohn, the major dissolute character in the play, who was, really was, Trump’s legal adviser.
 
It’s a marathon. Two plays in a day and my attention didn’t hold for all the 7½ hours spent in seats that weren’t made for that long. It’s still impressive but (and I’m not speaking for the rest of the audience nor the reviewers) the scope feels so huge that it’s ragged round the edges. And sometimes in the middle too. A bit tired, a bit forgiving of self-indulgent characters, a bit, well, removed? A view of a past that we’ve processed into history rather than a swirl of the confusion of now.
 
That’s the play. The acting was completely, utterly astonishing.
 
I’d be really interested to know what anyone else thinks about it:
Part one, Millennium Approaches, will be in cinemas on 20 July and part two, Perestroika, on 27 July. Encores of both parts from 4 August.