Angels in America review – Tony Kushner’s five-hour fever dream predicts and reflects the US at 250 | Edinburgh festival 2026

Could Tony Kushner’s sprawling fever-dream of a play now have come of age? It is 35 years since the two-part epic had its premiere in San Francisco when the memory of its Aids-crisis setting a few years earlier was still acute. Today, enough time has passed for us to see it in perspective: the historical moment in the mid 1980s when a new and initially untreatable virus was spreading, primarily among gay men, at the same time as reactionary conservative forces were in the ascendant under the two presidential terms of Ronald Reagan.

In an Edinburgh international festival that is asking questions of the United States in the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, Angels in America seems to predict and reflect the contradictory nation of today.

Subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, the five-hour play lays out a set of competing ideologies as if psychoanalysing the country: the guilt of Judaism, the forgiveness of Catholicism, the repression of Mormonism, the liberation of being out and proud, the self-hatred of being closeted, and the law-of-the-jungle individualism that stokes right-wing thought.

“America has rediscovered itself,” says Joe Pitt (Krisjan Schellingerhout), a Republican Mormon, believing that, under Reagan, his country has reclaimed a “sacred position among nations”. Such messianic idealism runs counter to reality. There is a hole in the ozone layer, points out Harper (Eefje Paddenburg), his wife, and only a particular type of sociopath, such as Joe’s idol Roy Cohn (Hans Kesting), would be proud that this is “no country for the infirm”.

Joe and Roy are symbols of a nation eating itself from the inside. Joe, because he cannot square his conservative values with being secretly gay. Roy, because he associates homosexuality with weakness: “Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man … who fucks around with guys.” The play does not mention it, but in the 70s and 80s, this real-life New York lawyer and kingmaker represented Donald Trump.

So far so polemical, but the appeal of Kushner’s play is the way it blurs into the mythic with its feverish hallucinations. Characters end up in each other’s dreams, there are visitations from horny angels, Harper treats her Valium like a passport to faraway places and even the brutish Roy is haunted by Ethel Rosenberg (Marieke Heebink), a woman condemned to death as a result of his prosecution.

It is this dreamlike quality that pervades Ivo van Hove’s masterly staging for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, first seen in 2008 and performed here in Dutch, with English surtitles. Actors seem to appear out of nowhere on Jan Versweyveld’s edgeless set, empty but for a counter with a couple of turntables blasting out favourites by David Bowie, a musician whose stridency and vulnerability are a good match for the play. There are no doors, beds, tables or phones; just a fluid movement of people and ideas as scenes wash over each other.

Leading an exemplary cast of eight, Kesting is at the play’s troubling heart as a Roy Cohn who is at once brutish and intellectually consistent. Even as his body decays, he dominates with alpha-male energy. His day is not over yet.