A minimalist Dutch version of Tony Kushner’s maximalist New York epic Angels in America? I’d have my doubts except for the fact that Ivo van Hove’s production for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam has been kicking around in the company’s repertoire since 2008, and its reputation precedes it.
That said I might have enjoyed the first half of its UK debut more if expectations weren’t quite so high. Because Van Hove’s adaptation is quite something to get your head around.
Angels in America – or to give it its full name, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes – famously consists of two full-length plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. They’re almost always revived together (they’re two halves of the same story after all) making any production a fairly monumental undertaking. So yes, Jan Versweyveld’s ‘set’ is ultra stripped back: the stage is bare apart from a packing case with two record players, a projector and some David Bowie LPs on top of it. But it still runs at five hours - it can only feel so sparse. It remains epic.
What I found disorientating is that Van Hove’s staging strips out the more vivid tones of Kushner’s hallucinatory epic. Certainly the bare stage and restrained Dutch language performances hardly conjure New York City and yet it is a story of NYC – you can’t really denature it into a universal ‘no place’. So it takes a while to warm up; and the cast’s performances need some time to adjust to.
But by the second half, it’s flying. At this stage in the proceedings we’ve moved away from exposition. Closeted real-life bastard lawyer Roy Cohn (Hans Kesting) is dying of AIDS in hospital while hallucinating (or possibly actually being visited by) the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the Soviet spy he’d illegally pressured a judge into having executed decades previously. Meanwhile Prior Walter (Eelco Smits) - one of a quartet of complicated gay male heroes - is also dying of AIDS but is receiving visits from an Angel with eight vaginas that want to turn him into her prophet. The stripped-down approach works well with all the really mad stuff that may or may not be intended to to be taken literally, and by now we long know the characters well enough to understand them without period signifiers.
And the lack of set or period signifiers of general pizzazz starts to work in its favour. You could easily imagine the supernatural elements to be hallucinations. Equally you could imagine it to be set today and the epidemic to simply be another supernatural phenomenon. Or maybe they’re all in heaven! Although Donald Trump is never mentioned, Cohn was his mentor and many of the play’s musings on the political soul of America and the endgame of Reaganism feel pertinent to the second Trump regime.
There are some fine performances: company mainstay Kesting is typically formidable as a granite-like Cohn who Kushner never forgives but at least finds compassion for - Kesting gives him a sharklike bluntness, devoid of ego… you can understand why Black gay nurse Belize (Jesse Mensah) comes to form an awkward truce with him. And Eefje Paddenburg is particularly good as Harper, the one lead female character, wife to Krisjan Schellingerhout’s naive Mormon conservative Joe Pitt. She has a charmingly fey quality from the beginning, which sets her up beautifully from her subsequent rupture from reality, and gives a pleasingly otherworldly tang to her more strident ending.
Speaking of otherworldly: the main directorial indulgence Van Hove allows himself is the use of a number of Bowie songs – a couple of the big numbers, but a lot of off-the-beaten-track stuff from the likes of Outside and the instrumental side of Heroes. It’s… nice, although it feels like there isn’t so much that the music feels fully embedded in the production’s DNA, it mostly just feels there because Van Hove likes Bowie and even for him, minimalism has its limits.
Angels in America is such a monolithic undertaking it only gets done once a generation. It feels a bit tacky, then, to compare this to the play’s last UK production, the National Theatre’s megabucks, celebrity-tastic 2017 revival. They couldn’t be more different. But they’re both ultimately beautiful, mad, moving productions of this, the last great American play of the twentieth century.