Angels in America, EIF theatre review: 'Astonishing visionary power'

Angels In America ★★★★

King’s Theatre until 20 August

In the 18 years since Ivo van Hove first unveiled his acclaimed production of Tony Kushner’s early 1990s epic Angels In America, the world has lost David Bowie - the beautiful presiding angel of rock whose music drives the action through its five hours - and the USA has twice elected Donald Trump as President.

Yet these and other traumatic changes have only increased the astonishing power of Van Hove’s spare and brilliant staging, giving it a prophetic quality that increasingly matches the force of Kushner’s extraordinary play; and now, Van Hove’s staging is revived as part of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival reflection on the 250th anniversary of the United States.

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Subtitled “a gay fantasia on national themes”, Angels In America comes in two parts - Millennium Approaches and Perestroika - and is set in New York during the Reagan years of the 1980s, a kind of dry run for the age of Trump when greed and wealth accumulation was celebrated, the advancing AIDS epidemic was widely dismissed as a ‘gay plague’, and liberal social attitudes were increasingly despised as threats to national strength and virility.

Around this theme, Kushner gathers an extraordinary cast of characters, led by the repulsive Roy Cohn, a true-life figure who was a leading lawyer close to the Reagan government, and a notorious macho racist and homophobe who had prolific sexual relations with men.

We also meet his strait-laced young Mormon protege Joe, struggling to deny his own homosexuality, Joe’s increasingly distraught wife Harper, and a troubled New York gay couple, Prior and Louis, who are on the point of breakup because Louis cannot stand Prior’s physical decline with AIDS.

READ MORE: 'It's more important than ever.' The enduring influence of Angels in America

Here, though, the stage is never a literal representation of 1990s New York. Instead, it is a vast open space - backed by shadowy images of city, sea and sky - where earth, hell and heaven collide, and millennial angels arrive and intervene in the strangest of guises.

In this setting, Hans Kesting delivers a magnificently brutal and subtle performance as the proto-Trump figure of Cohn, with superb support from Marieke Heebink as a remarkable range of commenting older women - living and dead - and from the whole ensemble company of eight; the play’s powerful strand of reflection on American Jewish history is beautifully recognised and teased out.

And although no one has ever described Angels In America - vast, wild, wordy, and full of baroque speculations and fever-dreams - as a perfect well-made play, to see it live on stage, in 2026, is to marvel at its sheer energy, haunting beauty, and astonishing visionary power; so perfectly embodied in Bowie’s voice, and in the enduring greatness of Ivo van Hove’s brave, beautiful and demanding production. Joyce McMillan

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