Angels In America

Published on Sunday 6 May 2007 02:55

Angels In America

Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow Tuesday May 1 and Wednesday May 2

****

IF YOU want a masterclass in acting and stagecraft, not to mention the joy of a thrillingly ambitious piece of writing, clear your diary for Angels In America. There's no question Tony Kushner's "gay fantasia on national themes" puts demands on your time - it comes in two parts, both over three and a half hours - yet Daniel Kramer's brilliant staging with a flawless cast of eight compels you to savour every minute.

Seeing the show, a co-production between the Citz, Headlong and the Lyric Hammersmith, on two consecutive nights or, better still, a single Saturday marathon, it's puzzling to think there was ever a two-year gap between the original productions of the first and second parts. Long they may be, but in narrative terms, Perestroika is clearly a second act to the unresolved first act of Millennium Approaches. Together, they are like a complete play from some parallel universe where there are more hours in the day. If, as one of Kushner's angels suggests, humanity is a victim of the "virus of time", it's a virus to which this playwright is peculiarly resistant.

Everyone in Millennium Approaches - which is set in a mid-Eighties New York plagued by Aids, racial tension and right-wing politics is on a quest for their missing feminine values. Each of them, whether male or female, is unknowingly dragged down by the tyranny of their masculine sides, locked in the straitjackets of religious, political or sexual dogma, subconsciously seeking escape from strictures that keep them from being whole people. This is so for corrupt lawyer Roy M Cohn (a rasping Greg Hicks) and his lust for power as much as it is for Joseph Porter Pitt (Jo Stone-Fewings, above) who is sublimated by his Mormon faith.

The first part ends on a note of pre-millennial despair, as if the seemingly inescapable torments inflicted on the characters - mental illness, terminal disease, spiritual bankruptcy - are directly related to an impending apocalypse. For all Kushner's imaginative leaps, taking us repeatedly from elevated soap opera to metaphysical poetry with tremendous theatrical assurance, we are not psychologically hardwired to accept such a pessimistic conclusion. It's weird to think the audiences in the early-Nineties had to wait so long for Kushner to fulfil his closing tune-in-next week promise that "the Great Work begins".

But fulfil it he does with even more extravagance in the hallucinatory Perestroika. Gradually he replaces his anger at the callousness of Reaganite politics, the cruelty of Aids and the emasculation of religious orthodoxy with the possibility of change and resolution. Now it's the angels who seem reactionary and the human beings who are prepared to choose life. "You don't make assumptions about me, mister; I won't make them about you," says Ann Mitchell's Mormon matriarch to the homosexual Prior Walter (Mark Emerson) in a liberating challenge to prejudice.

Fifteen years on, our apocalyptic gloom has only deepened, keeping this extraordinary play as urgent as Kramer's staging is superb.

The Citz, Glasgow (0141-429 0022), until Saturday www.citz.co.uk