The fact that Aids is no longer an almost certain death sentence may have diminished some of the impact of Tony Kushner's epic fantasy Angels in America, first seen at the National Theatre in 1991. But this big, bold, brave northern premier of part one, Towards the Millennium, set in the Reaganite boom years of 1985-86, benefits from an extra edginess as we crash headlong towards the end of the century.
"In the new century we'll all be insane," declares one of the characters happily. But in Phil Willmott's production, dominated by a sad-eyed head of the Statue of Liberty peeling like a decrepit advertising hoarding, the madness is already present, as if the century itself is undergoing a psychic disintegration. Guilt seeps across the play like an ugly, sticky stain.
Although clumsy at times and clearly cash-strapped in places, the production successfully fuses the physical and psychological, body and soul, reality and fantasy as Prior Walter faces death and toxoplasmosis in the brain, his former lover, Louis, flees from the stench of sickness; Mormon Joseph Pitt struggles with his conscience and homosexuality; his unhappy wife Harper pops endless valiums and frets about the hole in the ozone layer in Antarctica; and right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn, friend of McCarthy and closet gay, his body destroyed by Aids, receives his judgment call from none other than Ethel Rosenberg, whose death in the electric chair he did so much to bring about.
It's a heady mix of religion, politics, sex, fact and flight of fantasy in which the private and public, meaning and metaphor, irony and ingenuousness are so cunningly meshed that the watcher is not just touched by individual stories but plunged into deep mourning for the century itself.
Perhaps, most of all, this is what this production confirms: we may believe that the millennium signals the start of something, but perhaps all it signifies is the end. As a death knell for the 20th century, and even life itself, Angels in America continues to toll loudly and insistently.
