Sydney Reviews

Left – Luke Mullins & Paula Arundell. Cover – Mitchell Butel & Luke Mullins. Photos – Heidrun Lohr

Angels in America is an astonishing piece of theatre. I’m not sure how else to describe it. It is epic and sweeping and moving and hilarious and tragic and poetic and complex and unbelievably, unbelievably beautiful. Tony Kushner’s lyrical meisterwerk is brought to the stage brilliantly by Eamon Flack and his team in this production at Belvoir.

It is difficult to know where to begin when a work is as big as this one: its scale is, quite literally, cosmic. But despite this epic scale and the piece’s massive length (The Millennium Approaches and Perestroika both run for about three and a half hours each), its real beauty is in the small moments, the little stories. Within the unfolding narrative of the apocalyptic AIDS virus and the problems of heaven and hell, there is the lonely figure of Prior Walter (Luke Mullins). He is the vehicle of the virus and the vehicle of an angel, but more than this, he is simply a man: a man who loves deeply, feels keenly, and wants more than anything to live. In what is probably the best performance I have seen on Sydney stages this year, Mullins has brought Prior to life with heartbreaking intensity.

He is ably supported by an excellent ensemble. In a similarly outstanding performance, Amber McMahon excels as Harper, the pill-popping housewife who wants to travel but is too afraid to leave her own house. She and Prior communicate in hallucinations but only rarely encounter each other in real life, becoming the two poles between which the narrative evolves. They are two people who are loved but are not loved enough: Prior’s boyfriend Louis (Mitchell Butel) embarks on an affair with Harper’s husband Joe (Ashley Zukerman). These two characters could be unsympathetic in the wrong hands, but Butel and Zukerman handle these difficult roles with aplomb. Similarly excellent are DeObia Oparei in the role of Prior’s ex and now nurse Belize and Marcus Graham as the despicable Roy Cohn, the man who forces his doctor to diagnose him with liver cancer instead of AIDS and who has gleefully sent a woman to her death in the electric chair.

Looming over this show is, of course, the figure of the angel (Paula Arundell), the cosmic figure who has chosen Prior to be the prophet of a fractured and confused America. Her entrance at the end of Part One is spectacular – if a smoke machine has ever been used to greater effect, I have never seen it. The famous scene where she wrestles with Prior as Jacob once wrestled with an angel is, however, a little underwhelming: the terrible, inexorable nature of the angel is perhaps not adequately communicated here (although we could certainly read this as foreshadowing for the scene where the seven angels convene in heaven). The most effective moments with the angel are actually the moments when she is not on stage, when we get mere hints of her presence. The scene in The Millennium Approaches where a single feather flutters from the sky to land at Prior’s feet is chilling.

Angels in America is preoccupied with ideas of justice, both divine and manmade. It offers no solution to the complex problems it raises, and nor should it. Things are not fair in this cosmology. Lovers leave. Husbands are not attracted to their wives. One man hoards a stash of the drug that is desperately needed by hundreds of thousands of people as the ghost of the woman he killed sings for his soul. It is a desperate, apocalyptic world where what is fair does not matter. So what do we do? Do we escape into the world of fantasy like Harper and build a castle in the clouds? Or do we refuse our destinies like Prior does – refuse to die, even though dying would be easy, and choose instead to rebuild a new life?

This is a remarkable production of an incredible play. It is full of those moments where writing, direction, acting, and the technical all combine to create something magical. It is intensely emotional and incredibly draining. I saw it all in one day, The Millennium Approaches in the afternoon and Perestroika at night, and despite the fact that meant I was sitting still for seven hours, I found myself exhausted at the end of it. But the exhaustion was well worth it. This is awesome theatre in the true sense of the word “awe”. Absolutely not to be missed.


Belvoir presents
Angels In America
by Tony Kushner

Part One: Millennium Approaches
Part Two: Perestroika

Director Eamon Flack

Venue: Belvoir St Theatre | Upstairs
Dates: 28 May – 14 July 2013
Tickets: $65 – $45
Bookings: 02 9699 3444 | belvoir.com.au

Venue: Theatre Royal
Dates: 18 – 28 July 2013
Tickets: $90 – $35
Bookings: 02 9699 3444 or belvoir.com.au | 1 300 723 038 or ticketmaster.com.au