Review: Angels in St Andrews

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a Pulitzer Prize winning play and a behemoth of a dramatic work. At over three hours running length (and this is just the first half), it’s the kind of play that makes most directors pale with fear. But fortunately not Adelaide Waldrop who, quite incredibly, takes the whole thing in her stride. The play itself has an unfortunate reputation as being ‘that play about AIDs,’ but in actual fact its scope is quite extraordinary. In a series of complexly interwoven stories which include historical and fictional characters, real scenes and fantastical ones, the play offers a grandiose vision, sometimes dark and sometimes redemptive, of the American psyche. Each character, like the biblical Jacob, is wrestling with his or her own angel.

To pull all this off one needs excellent actors and that is exactly what the production had. The entire cast was so in tune with each other, as well as their own characters, that the whole thing resembled a master class in ‘how it should be done.’ Of particular note is the relationship between Frazer Hadfield’s Louis Ironson and Brendan Macdonald’s Prior Walter. Their chemistry, through the poignant discovery of Prior’s lesions denoting HIV to their painful break up, was always evident. Within an extraordinary cast, they really stood out. 

This painful break up is played in parallel to the deterioration of Edie Deffebach’s Harper Pitt and Sebastian Carrington-Howell’s Joe Pitts’ highly conservative, Mormon-based lavender marriage. Their relationship is equally intense, although because we never see them as a functioning couple as we do with Ironson and Walter, their break up lacks the same poignancy. That having been said Deffebach’s valium induced mannerisms and Carrington-Howell’s tender shyness are highly effective. And the play is not all tragic. For instance, Kufasse Boane’s rolling eyes and wordless ‘hmming’ through Hadfield’s neurotic ‘let’s get a coffee while I tell you what’s wrong with the world’ speech was able to punctuate some quite incomprehensible dialogue with some big laughs.

Waldrop’s production also benefits greatly from its lack of squeamishness. She is as unrelenting as the material requires her to be. Rectal bleeding, a pick up in the park and full nudity are all shown in the most vulnerable and debilitating of ways and the impact is tremendous. Venue 1 is also used to great aplomb. Four separate stage spaces are each used effectively, each one connected with a certain plot strand or a certain character. And the final scene, which it would be criminal to give away, relies upon some spectacular staging that you would not believe possible in Venue 1.

However, there were a number of technical issues with lighting cues, particularly at the beginning of the second act, and certain scene changes were not nearly as smooth as they needed to be. In a long play even the slightest of hesitations becomes exaggerated. But these are all the kind of problems that invariably come with the opening night of such a huge show.

The real problem with the play however is that it is only half told. This is only part one of a seven hour epic. The ending is thus more of a cliff-hanger than a resolution. One has to go straight to the internet for the HBO series to make any sense of it. All the plot strands are left hanging, its characters still hurtling aimlessly into the new millennium. It was a disappointing pay off.

Nevertheless, this is just the end. Viewed as a whole Angels in America is a great success. Sure it feels long, but not nearly as long as three hours. It is an intense and often powerful piece of theatre. Waldrop and her cast have every right to feel proud about it. 

All images © Kelly Diepenbrock