ANGELS IN AMERICA

About the show

Angels in America premiered in 2008 in the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam. The original script was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. Ivo van Hove made it into a five-hour theatre marathon. Van Hove’s 2008 bare-staged Angels in America ‘was the most literal version of anti-space I’ve seen in the conventional theatre,’ says the author Tony Kushner. ‘It threw the entire event on the actors and their performances. There was no attempt to create stage illusion of any sort. The only departure from the play was that the Angel was played by a male actor. You learn immensely new things from whatever is formalistically unfamiliar in his productions.’ Hans Kesting received the Louis d’Or, prize for best male actor, for his role as Roy Cohn. Angels in America takes place in New York during the eighties, the Reagan years. It is a mosaic of stories about people struggling with love, sexuality and the disastrous consequences of AIDS. Louis deserts his friend Prior, who is terminally ill. The marriage of Joe and Harper Pitt falls apart. The right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn discovers that neither power nor money will protect him from death. Angels in America is in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. In the first part, three separate storylines are introduced, which gradually become interwoven. In the second part, the play moves more into an unreal world of hallucinations. Angels in America is about transformation, release, being reborn and the long road that leads there.