King’s Theatre,
Five stars
America is sick in Tony Kushner’s epic evocation of the rise of AIDS and its political fallout in what eventually becomes a visionary hymn of hope. Thirty-four years since Kushner’s two-part magical realist fantasia first appeared, the world has changed and changed again in radical fashion, with sex in the city a very different proposition these days and big pharma ramping up the prices of life saving medication.
Despite the play’s 1980s setting, Ivo van Hove’s International Theater Amsterdam revival of a production first seen in 2008 nevertheless reads like a tragicomic state of the nation prophecy of today’s increasingly dark times and how we got here. An early riff between one of the play’s key couples lays out the 57 varieties of migrant that make up the American diaspora, with the near five hour performance being played in Dutch adding to the international melting pot.
Shortened from the play’s original seven hours by dramaturg Peter van Kraaij, its emphases may be broader than just the AIDS crisis, but the tangled relationships at the play’s heart remain the same. The first is 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. With Harper strung-out on Valium, ambitious lawyer Joe has just been made an offer he can’t refuse by his boss. Serious weight is added to this request by the fact that the boss in question is Roy Cohn, the legal monster based on the real-life closet-case attorney and former sidekick of U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s House UnAmerican Activities anti communist witchhunt.
In art as in life, Cohn dominates everything he touches. This is the man, after all, who taught Donald Trump how to do the things he does the way he does, arguably shaping global political discourse as we know it. Played with a wise guy swagger by Hans Kesting, Cohn’s physical demise is the perfect metaphor for the rotting carcass of corruption, denial and hypocrisy on a grand - not to say criminal - scale that looks all too familiar in daily dispatches.
As Reagonomics went hand in hand with the UK’s free market economy under Margaret Thatcher, what initially looked like golden years for young Americans soon turns into the party pooping fallout that drives Kushner’s play. In the second part, Perestroika, the central couples’ dreams are invaded under the influence of various substances Cohn, meanwhile, finally gets his comeuppance from the end of a drip care of Scrooge-like hallucinations of Marieke Heebink’s Ethel Rosenberg, the woman convicted of spying for the Soviet Union who Cohn helped send to the electric chair.
All this is soundtracked by music from across the different ages of David Bowie. Giving the show its emotional heart, these songs are played on the twin record decks that form one of designer Jan Versweyveld’s few physical constructions on a sparse but sleek looking stage.
There are no big numbers here in an understated and surprisingly funny affair loaded with a mix of hysteria and high camp from a cast that includes Minne Koole and Eelco Smits as Louis and Prior, and Eefje Paddenburg and Krisjan Schellingerhout as Harper and Joe. Everything is conducted in business fashion. Even Felix SchellekensAngel, when he appears, sports wing-free hospital whites. It is this everyday ordinariness that gives events their power, and there are no flourishes or tricks designed to dazzle, only Tal Yarden’sslo-mo black and white video projections at the back of the stage showing off American iconography.
If anyone was to write a play about America’s current political landscape right now and show it to aliens, it would likely be dismissed as being too over the top. Let them take a look at Angels in America, however, and it would all make as much terrifying sense as it does here in a monumental meditation on the shape of things to come.
Until Aug 19, 6pm.
The Herald, August 19, 2026
ends
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