1993 – Angels in Australia.
One of the joys of life is to experience worlds beyond your own. I don’t mean looking at the universe, although that is profound in a different sense. Rather it is experiencing another world through a book, a play, or an opera. Music, the visual arts and literature can take you away from your day-to-day life, offering a window into other lives, experiences and emotions. I can, and often do, spend hours listening to music or reading a novel, sometimes reaching the end of a book with a shock: time has passed, and I have been in another place, among people who, briefly, had been as real as those in my normal existence, sometimes even more involving and demanding. Not just a shock, but a compelling desire to return: surely the author has written another book, taking those lives further, even if it’s been a detective novel and the murderer has been caught. That can’t be the end, there must be more!
Among those wonderful, thrilling and emotionally demanding experiences, theatre holds a special place. Now the story takes place in front of you, with flesh and blood people, often so close it seems you are with them in the same room. Yes, I love falling under the spell of theatre. There have been many times I have sat in a darkened theatre and been transported for a couple of hours or longer, witnessing lives unfold, tragedies develop, living through joy, disaster and heartbreak. Great staging and great actors create magic. Sometimes I have been so immersed that I have had to sit for a minute as I slowly re-enter the world around me. At the end of a production of Peter Weiss’s Marat Sade (aka The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade), performed at the 1990 Adelaide Festival, I sat for at least two minutes at the end, stunned by the SA State Theatre Company production. I wasn’t alone. Not only were others in the audience as totally absorbed as I was, but I saw an actor so deeply embedded in her role she was unable to participate in the usual cast acknowledgement with her colleagues: the play was over, but on stage she was still one of the asylum inmates.
When I saw that play, I had no idea as to what I was about to witness, and it has remained one of my most unforgettable experiences. Equally extraordinary, and again in a way I could not have anticipated, was an evening at the Russell Street Theatre in Melbourne in late 1993. I was a regular subscriber to seasons put on by the Melbourne Theatre Company. The Russell Street Theatre was old, somewhat out of place among the modern corporate offices and hotels. I had been there several times before, and entered looking forward to another professionally presented play, albeit something modern and about which I knew nothing. No curtains shrouding the stage, there was a bed, some furniture, and it looked a little unfinished, as if the set designer and stagehands hadn’t been able to complete their work. Slightly odd? Normally I would have read the programme at this point, but the play was about to begin, and moments later, Angels in America began. This was confronting, brilliant and disturbing, magical-realist theatre at its best. Like many others in the audience, I remained in my seat at the end, not applauding, but simply transfixed by the experience.
To put that evening in context, I was aware of AIDS and the havoc it had wreaked in many communities, especially among gay men. However, that knowledge was, to use a theatre phrase, ‘through a glass darkly’. I was living in Australia, and in that somewhat isolated place, AIDS seemed rather distant, even though one of the early centres was St Kilda, not far from the central business district. The truth of the matter is I was the one who was rather isolated from much of what was happening. Tony Kushner’s play quickly changed that.
Angels in American, subtitled ‘A Gay Fantasia on National Themes’, was a complex play about AIDS and homosexuality in the USA, reflecting on events in the preceding decade. The play is in two parts, Millennium Approaches, and Perestroika (the latter was finished in 1993). Certainly complex, as there were parts for angels and ghosts as well as the main characters of the story, each actors played more than one role, and the set was deliberately incomplete. Many years later I read Kushner’s views on the staging: “The plays benefit from a pared-down style of presentation, with scenery kept to an evocative and informative minimum. … I recommend rapid scene shifts (no blackouts!), employing the cast as well as stagehands in shifting the scene. This must be an actor-driven event. … The moments of magic … are to be fully imagined and realized, as wonderful theatrical illusions – which means it’s OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do.” We are so blasé about this approach to staging thirty years later it is hard to convey what a shock it was back then.
That night, I was about to see Millennium Approaches, directed by Neil Armfield, who later established Company B at Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, which with Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre drove new directions in theatrical productions. Armfield had seen the play in the US, and his production closely followed the original. I was stunned, so immersed in what was happening, I don’t remember any interval breaks. I checked: there were two! It’s possibly the play of the decade: if you haven’t seen it, a 2003 HBO miniseries version is available, directed by Mike Nichols, with a stellar cast including Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson and several other outstanding actors. It’s still amazing.
Briefly, if you don’t know the story, Millennium Approaches is set in the Reagan years in New York in the latter half of 1985 and early 1986. It centres around Louis Ironson, and his lover Prior Walter, who has AIDS. As Prior’s illness worsens, Louis becomes unable to cope and abandons Prior. Working in the same office as Louis is Joe, whose wife has become a drug addict. Joe and Louis begin an affair, while Roy, Joe’s boss, discovers he is dying from AIDS. Meanwhile Prior begins hearing an angelic voice telling him to prepare for her arrival and receives visits from a pair of ghosts who claim to be his ancestors, and who inform him he is a prophet. Prior, and we in the audience, do not know if these visitations are caused by an emotional breakdown or if they are real. Enough? I did say it was complex, and it come to a crashing conclusion at the end of the play. I can’t even begin to summarise the key plot elements of Perestroika, the second part of Angels in America, in which the ravages of AIDS work their way through the group, and somewhere on the periphery, the Berlin Wall falls.
I don’t want to spoil the story. If you haven’t seen the plays, you should; if you have, you will know that it’s like a magical-realist novel. Despite angels and ghosts, it makes compelling sense. However, it is also a work in progress. I have little doubt that Kushner wrote it to explain that the AIDS crisis was still unfolding, as was still the case in the early 1990s, with more to be understood and resolved. Despite its outdated view, (AIDS exclusive to homosexuality and the gay community), Angels in America offers an unsettling window into people in a pandemic, relevant today as we are confronting the ravages of COVID-19. I don’t want to claim too much. Angels in America was a great production when I saw it in Melbourne, and remained so, little changed, when made into a film. By that I mean I doubt it is a play for the ages, but it was a great play play at the time; a recent revival in Melbourne acknowledged that. That’s rather different from talking about a stunning interpretation of a masterpiece. At the risk of sounding like an old-fashioned white Anglo-Saxon male (which I am!), this isn’t a Hamlet or a Lear. Those are plays that can be staged anew countless times, and their underlying story transmuted into contemporary settings and situations.
Perhaps this is what fascinates me about Angels in America. For me, and for the early 1990s, it was a compelling and unforgettable experience. As much in evidence of my ignorance, Kushner thrust the complexities of the gay community, drag, American health care, and the politics of the 1980s all into the limelight. Theatrical tricks and clever staging served to make the same point: ‘Wake up, the world is changing’!’ It was, and Tony Kushner made certain I realised. He also did an excellent job of pushing homosexuality, the horror of illness, and the confusions of love in front of a sheltered heterosexual male
The image of the angel is a strong one in Kushner’s play. Without detracting from the story, I can mention that the second part of the play ends with some of the characters gathering before the Angel of the Waters statue in the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, to discuss the fall of the Soviet Union and what the future might hold. Earlier in the play an Angel brings a message for mankind to ‘stop moving!’, articulating the belief that ‘if man ceases to progress, Heaven will be restored’. I can’t help but believe that Kushner was also influenced by the concept of ‘our better angel’. Apparently, the phrase ‘better angel’ is from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 144 “The better angel is a man right fair” (although unfortunately he followed that with “The worser spirit a woman colored ill” in the next line!). More to the point, for a US citizen, it appears in Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, which concluded: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
This is at the core of so much theatre. What we see played out in front of us is men and women battling events and relationships while attempting to hang on to the better angels of their nature or succumbing to the temptations of those opposing and malevolent dark angels. Certainly, the plays I remember are the ones where the playwright gives us the opportunity to live through the emotional lives and psychology of the characters, even if the plots are relatively prosaic. Just think of the simple story of Othello, in which a guy is tricked into believing his wife is unfaithful and kills her, but around that tale hangs a compelling account of how people misunderstand, are misled, and are goaded into irreversible, fateful actions.
Kushner’s views about the staging of Angels in America reiterated an important but familiar truth: he wanted it to be a “pared-down style of presentation, with scenery kept to an evocative and informative minimum”. Just so. We know this is a play, the setting is artificial, and our focus is on the people and what they have to say. I still recall a Bell Shakespeare production of Hamlet, back in 1991, in a tent. Like every other member of the audience, I didn’t notice as I was completely absorbed by John Bell and the other actors. Turning Hamlet into a ‘realistic’ film often robs the play of its force. Indeed, much as I like the HBO film of Angels in America, that Melbourne Theatre Company production was at least as involving, and did so without the star-power the film version included.
Novels and plays offer very different experiences. When I am reading an outstanding book, even a good one, I inhabit the world the author has created. Carefully delineated characters and settings leave me with ample room to imagine this territory into which I’ve been invited. Sometimes the author sets the events in places I know. I’ve just read a murder mystery partially set in Cambridge, referring to streets and places I recall with the pleasure of familiarity, but even in this case, I am still allowed plenty of space to ‘fill in’ details as I read.
Indeed, I wonder what you do when offered the chance to watch a film or television series based on works by an author you know and love. I find it’s a dilemma. If what’s on offer is a version of a book I’ve already read, then I can watch the visual version, switching it on while making the assumption that it will be similar – but not the same as – the version I have read. It’s as if I am reading a familiar story, but this is a version that is pleasantly new and different. My only rule is that I am always determined to read or reread the book first, because I know once I see the film the characters have been filled in for me, the settings made concrete. I have been working through P D James series of murder investigations by Adam Dalgleish recently, for the third or fourth time, but, having seen the television series, now I find it hard not to see Dalgleish as portrayed by Roy Marsden. He wasn’t the right person to suit my imagination, and I was far more comfortable with Martin Shaw for the last two in the series (how confusing to have two different actors!). Too late: after the first few episodes Roy Marsden was Dalgleish, and Martin Shaw appeared an interloper. It’s for that reason that if an upcoming film is based on a book I haven’t read, I want to read the book first, so my enjoyment of the story isn’t shaped by the actors and the settings that are used.
Of course, that leaves the third possibility, which is that this is based on a familiar character but involves a plot that hasn’t appeared in a book. This proved to be a continuing challenge when the television series based on the murder investigations by Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks began to drift further and further away from the novels. I liked Banks, and I enjoyed the first three seasons, but as time went on, I lost enthusiasm: it wasn’t because I didn’t like some of the episodes, but this was no longer the Banks I had come to know and love. Right now, I am facing the same dilemma over the various seasons of Shetland, based on Ann Cleeves’ books. So far, the portrayal of Jimmy Perez by Douglas Henshaw has worked so well I am happy to be travelling down a different path from the books, but I wonder for how many more seasons that will last?
I suppose the truth is that all novels have a magical-realism element to them. Clearly, that doesn’t mean all novels contain angels, ghosts or other imagined creatures (although I should admit I am fond of many that include witches and the like). What I mean is that the novel is by its nature magical: it creates a world, people, events, that have never existed, and yet which can seem as real as the physical world that surrounds us.
Are the better angels of our nature sufficient? Perhaps we need more. Legislation helps. In the US, this was the year Clinton put Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Supreme Court: perhaps she wasn’t an angel, but she certainly sought to pursue what she saw as our better nature. One thing is certain. Angel or not, we need more RBGs as judges to keep the focus on what matters, free of ideological distortions and pedantic literalism.
Some other evidence of our better nature in 1993 comes from Australia. Following the High Court’s Mabo ruling in 1992, the Native Title Act was passed into law at the end of the year, in order to “provide a national system for the recognition and protection of native title and for its co-existence with the national land management system”. The Act established processes to “determine where native title exists, how future activity impacting upon native title may be undertaken, and to provide compensation where native title is impaired or extinguished, giving Indigenous Australians who hold native title rights and interests, or who have made a native title claim, the right to be consulted and, in some cases, to participate in decisions about activities proposed to be undertaken on the land”. Once the Act was passed, in 1993 the Australian Government began to provide funding to help resolve native title issues. It seems there were some ‘better angels’ to be found in Australia establishing rights for indigenous Australians, even if they were 205 years late. Who could have imagined we would find Angels in Australia?
