THEATRE: Guy Willoughby
ANGELS are definitely making a comeback. Ever since Wim Wenders’ achingly lyrical movie Wings of Desire (1987), the prospect of lovely and innocent beings at work in a fallen world has taken imaginative hold. This is perhaps a signal that, in the West, the world is regarded as so irretrievably rotten that only divine intervention can save it — an idea most popular, I think, among atheists.
Angels in America, at the State Theatre in Pretoria, is an extraordinarily rich and unusual play that uses the Aids phenomenon to debate a deep moral failure at the heart of American life. Combining gritty realism with playful, transcendent fantasy, the action images a corrupted society still haunted by the dreams of its past.
As the play describes it, the appearance of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s threw into sharp relief the limits of tolerance in American society. It also forced the gay community to re- evaluate itself and to face squarely the challenge of achieving equal status — not only for its own sake, but America’s.
Besides these public issues, Angels in America is the story of three interconnected personal dramas: the controversial career of New York lawyer Roy M Cohn; the unravelling marriage of a young civil servant and his drug-dependent wife; and the shattering impact of the Aids virus on a gay couple.
Playwright Tony Kushner’s blending of history and fiction is shrewd. Sean Taylor plays a fascinatingly awful historic character — Cohn, outward homophobe and rabid all-American. Once a henchman of the commie-bating Senator Joe McCarthy, Cohn was a ruthless survivor who came to wield great political influence.
Cohn’s denial of his true sexuality was the most contemptible part of him, and the scourge of Aids takes on a curious redemptive force here. Taylor’s Cohn is a blustering, leery and finally pathetic figure, whose fate somehow personifies the corruption of Reaganite America. It is a compelling performance.
The focus and energy of the cast are truly impressive. Jennifer Steyn excels as Harper, the valium-popping wife of a secretly gay Justice official (played with nervy phlegm by Nicky Rebelo). Steyn brilliantly conveys her character’s moods of delirium, her tottering sanity — and her flashes of vision.
As Louis Ironson, an overtly gay lawyer struggling to accept his partner’s battle with Aids, David Butler gives a performance of much subtlety and restraint. A febrile, guilt- ridden intellectual, Ironson tries to rationalise the faults of his society; but it is left to his dying friend, Prior, to witness the presence of grace in a tortured world.
The most powerful moment of the play comes when the bedridden Prior (flamboyantly played by Robert Coleman) is suddenly visited by a huge white feather that flutters down past his surprised face and lands, gently, on the floor. Could there really be angels in America? Go and see this fascinating play, and find out for yourself.
* Angels in America moves to the Alexander Theatre, Johannesburg, on August 10.