Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
4 stars
Tony Kushner’s epic two-part gay fantasia rocked post-Reaganite America at a time when the AIDS epidemic’s first spasms had gone global. Fifteen years on, with sex in the city an entirely different proposition, the taboo-breaking audaciousness of Kushner’s sprawling adventure in assorted underworlds remains an elaborately woven magical-realist soap opera of sex, love and death, intimate and prophetic in reach.
Daniel Kramer’s major revival plays at over seven hours in this three-way split between the Citizens, Headlong Theatre and Lyric Hammersmith, and is worth every second. Set in mid-1980s New York, at its heart are two tangled sets of relationships, one between a young gay couple, Louis and Prior, the other an equally doomed partnership between seemingly straight Mormons, Joe and Harper.
In the first part, Millennium Approaches, Prior is diagnosed with AIDS, leaving Louis equally scared to death. Harper’s strung-out on Valium, and lawyer Joe’s just been made an offer he can’t refuse by his boss Roy M Cohn, a motor-mouthed legal monster based on the real-life closet-case attorney. When the angels swoop into Prior’s dreams, a domestic maelstrom becomes a torrent of self-absorbed hallucinogenic delirium in a tumble of stand-up performance-art monologue, overwrought classicist emotionalism and high camp quasi-vaudeville.
Sentimental pieties are upended by smartass one-liners or cartoon fantasies. Harper’s pill-popping trip to Antarctica in particular predates Anthony Neilson’s Dissocia by eons. Yet the first two acts are forebodingly low-key demonstrations of back-alley apocalypse.
The first big explosion comes when Greg Hicks’ Cohn makes mincemeat of Jo Stone-Fewings’ Joe. Cohn’s perceived immortality is upended by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who he sent to the electric chair. At Prior’s bedside, his ancestors arrive like some Dickensian amalgam of Christmases past. Mentions of Bird Flu and Ground Zero jolt up from the text as The Angel observes that “In the new century I think we will all be insane.”
Part Two, Perestroika, is a messier, more obviously didactic affair. God’s desertion of Heaven is pure Nietzsche, fin-de-siecle fever is laid on with a trowel, yet remains both hissy-fit hilarious and a profound masterclass in self-deification. Much of this is down to Mark Emerson’s wisecracking as golden-haired Prior, forever sparring with Obi Abili’s dragged-up nurse Belize.
All eight actors excel, from Ann Mitchell’s series of matriarchs, Kirsty Bushell’s pop-eyed neuroses as Harper and Adam Levy’s tormented Louis. As the Angel, Golda Rosheuvel is a fierce apparition in what is essentially a dramatised history of a nation’s pioneering oppressed mongrel tribes, be they black, gay, Jew or even right wing Republican Mormon. Common ground comes through each character’s hyper-articulate ability for chasing their own tails en route to finding out who they are and where they belong. The world’s search for faith was ever thus.
Cutting the bulk of the play’s epilogue isn’t a good move, despite its time-specific loose-end tying. Even so, Prior’s final farewell, somewhere between Prospero and Cabaret’s Emcee, is utterly, shamelessly life-affirming in a work that’s of its time, yet transcends it in a blaze of emotional glory.
The Herald, May 4th 2007
ends
4 stars
Tony Kushner’s epic two-part gay fantasia rocked post-Reaganite America at a time when the AIDS epidemic’s first spasms had gone global. Fifteen years on, with sex in the city an entirely different proposition, the taboo-breaking audaciousness of Kushner’s sprawling adventure in assorted underworlds remains an elaborately woven magical-realist soap opera of sex, love and death, intimate and prophetic in reach.
Daniel Kramer’s major revival plays at over seven hours in this three-way split between the Citizens, Headlong Theatre and Lyric Hammersmith, and is worth every second. Set in mid-1980s New York, at its heart are two tangled sets of relationships, one between a young gay couple, Louis and Prior, the other an equally doomed partnership between seemingly straight Mormons, Joe and Harper.
In the first part, Millennium Approaches, Prior is diagnosed with AIDS, leaving Louis equally scared to death. Harper’s strung-out on Valium, and lawyer Joe’s just been made an offer he can’t refuse by his boss Roy M Cohn, a motor-mouthed legal monster based on the real-life closet-case attorney. When the angels swoop into Prior’s dreams, a domestic maelstrom becomes a torrent of self-absorbed hallucinogenic delirium in a tumble of stand-up performance-art monologue, overwrought classicist emotionalism and high camp quasi-vaudeville.
Sentimental pieties are upended by smartass one-liners or cartoon fantasies. Harper’s pill-popping trip to Antarctica in particular predates Anthony Neilson’s Dissocia by eons. Yet the first two acts are forebodingly low-key demonstrations of back-alley apocalypse.
The first big explosion comes when Greg Hicks’ Cohn makes mincemeat of Jo Stone-Fewings’ Joe. Cohn’s perceived immortality is upended by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who he sent to the electric chair. At Prior’s bedside, his ancestors arrive like some Dickensian amalgam of Christmases past. Mentions of Bird Flu and Ground Zero jolt up from the text as The Angel observes that “In the new century I think we will all be insane.”
Part Two, Perestroika, is a messier, more obviously didactic affair. God’s desertion of Heaven is pure Nietzsche, fin-de-siecle fever is laid on with a trowel, yet remains both hissy-fit hilarious and a profound masterclass in self-deification. Much of this is down to Mark Emerson’s wisecracking as golden-haired Prior, forever sparring with Obi Abili’s dragged-up nurse Belize.
All eight actors excel, from Ann Mitchell’s series of matriarchs, Kirsty Bushell’s pop-eyed neuroses as Harper and Adam Levy’s tormented Louis. As the Angel, Golda Rosheuvel is a fierce apparition in what is essentially a dramatised history of a nation’s pioneering oppressed mongrel tribes, be they black, gay, Jew or even right wing Republican Mormon. Common ground comes through each character’s hyper-articulate ability for chasing their own tails en route to finding out who they are and where they belong. The world’s search for faith was ever thus.
Cutting the bulk of the play’s epilogue isn’t a good move, despite its time-specific loose-end tying. Even so, Prior’s final farewell, somewhere between Prospero and Cabaret’s Emcee, is utterly, shamelessly life-affirming in a work that’s of its time, yet transcends it in a blaze of emotional glory.
The Herald, May 4th 2007
ends
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