The character who develops most in the second play is Garfield’s Prior Walter. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Belize, the one-time drag queen who becomes Cohn’s night nurse, touchingly suggests a certain compassion for a man whose politics he loathes. Lane’s Cohn remains the embodiment of bullying, power-hungry manipulativeness, but we almost come to pity him as he rages against encroaching death.
The best scenes in Perestroika are those that follow the fortunes of the characters we have come to know. James McArdle (Louis) and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Belize) in Angels in America. But the writing gets woollier the further Kushner strays from the recognisable and the earth-bound. Elliott stages the idea of angelic intervention ingeniously, with Amanda Lawrence appearing with spreadeagled wings and supported by a group of spectral shadows. I have to admit that Kushner loses me when he introduces angels into the action, even if their function is to suggest that they have been deserted by God, are doomed to inertia and that it is up to mankind to sort out its problems. James McArdle has just the right guilt-ridden charisma as his defecting lover, Louis, while Russell Tovey as a closeted Mormon and Denise Gough as his tormented wife exactly convey the agonies of a marriage mired in lies and self-deception.Īfter this, the four-hour second play, Perestroika, seems wilder, stranger, more surreal. Meanwhile, Garfield as Prior excellently combines a head-tossing, period-style camp with the desperate anguish of a man craving love in his hour of need. Lane, seen previously on the London stage as Max Bialystock in The Producers, is magnetic as Cohn, creating a figure who is part predator, part patriarch but, above all, a victim of his own sad delusions about the significance of power. Even allowing for the intervening presidencies of Clinton and Obama, this has a chilling resonance today and it comes as no surprise to learn that the corrupt Cohn acted as Donald Trump’s legal adviser for a decade.īut what really hits one is the expansiveness of Kushner’s imagination and the rich opportunities he creates for actors.
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