Theatre

Eighties America: Aids rages; Antarctica’s ozone layer is torn asunder; and an angel crashes to earth. Tony Kushner’s two-part seven-hour ‘gay fantasia on national themes’ is the play William Blake might have written if he’d been an HIV-positive New Yorker. Headlong Theatre’s revival is the first since its UK premiere, and it wisely respects historical specificity: Soutra Gilmour’s design and Mark Bauman’s costumes plunge you straight into Faustian Yuppie Apocalypse –  candle flames reflected in a backdrop of black, mirrored Perspex panes, which burst open to let in the actors along with the hooting, drilling, shrieking panic of the New York soundscape. Daniel Kramer’s direction is bold and intimate: intermingling couples, Jewish Louis and his Aids-afflicted lover Prior, and Mormon newlyweds Harper and Joe, leap in and out of the same hospital-style bed; their mutual betrayal and panic rings the alarm-bell on meltdown in the group-mind so loudly it sometimes muffles the notes of their individual connections.

Overly high-pitched acting (especially from Adam Levy’s ever-kvetching Louis) and hyper-manic direction sometimes fail to ground Kushner’s play – which is ever-prone to slip the surly bonds of earth for metaphysical swooping. But Kramer’s imaginative grappling with Angels is seriously impressive too: he generates millennial tension by having every actor verge at times on physical spasm, clenched halfway between ecstatic and fatal –  super-apt body language for Kushner’s mytho-political excess. Obi Abili is implacably funny as drag-queen Belize –  dropping camped-up wisecracks like acid rain on Reagan’s parade. Kirsty Bushell’s Harper and Mark Emerson’s Prior drop an emotional anchor through Kushner’s torrential prose. And Greg Hicks displays grotesque tenacity as Roy Cohn, the closeted Republican lawyer who dies padlocked to an illegal stash of retro-viral drugs, mocking his victims’ ghosts. Flawed? Yes, but also an un-missable theatrical event.