REVIEW: Angels In America Part One, National Theatre ✭✭✭✭✭
It’s hard to avoid the word ‘epic’ when discussing Tony Kushner’s play, the sweep and ambition is still broad and astonishing.
It’s hard to avoid the word ‘epic’ when discussing Tony Kushner’s play, the sweep and ambition is still broad and astonishing.
Margolyes is all stillness and urgent rouge-et-noir power; her delivery like acid etching a design on copperplate. Barber speaks with that magical voice that sounds like oloroso mixed with double cream and sprinkled with Pyrenean truffle. Every second in their company is like reading a gorgeous glossy magazine that you just can’t put down.
Perhaps the greatest testament to the spell cast by Lifeboat came from the audience of children sat crossed in two rows either side of the performance space, cross-legged, unmoving, immersed and rapt.
“You don’t so much leave at the end of this concert, as sail away from it on a wave of euphoria” says our theatre critic Julian Eaves of Maria Friedman.
The Treatment feels rather tame but, in this revival, it remains a mesmerising, entertaining dark comedy that conjures up the confusing perplexities of modern life.
Hopefully, we will get to enjoy Claybourne Elder’s fine, mellifluous vocals again in London, either in a return of his solo show or on a West End stage.
Maybe James Shirley isn’t one of the greatest playwrights ever to animate the stages of this country, but he’s far from the worst, and this is probably his best effort. It’s coming back to us at a time of national doubt comparable, in some ways, with the era of its origin.
The show is worth seeing for the cutting-edge visuals alone but, while it stylishly captures much of the theme and substance of the novel, it is lacking in emotional engagement – something that could also be said about Auster’s New York Trilogy.