FringeReview UK
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FringeReview UK 2017
Angels in America Part Two: Perestroika
Seeing Part Two reinforces the impression that in its virtues and a few vices, there’s nothing like this in theatre. An epic conveying a generational anger undergoing criminal abandonment, it blazons all corners of a nation. And the almost national multitude of cast and creatives Marianne Elliott’s assembled stands proud in this, almost beyond praise.
It’s what you’d not expect that thrusts this version before anything else you’ll imagine before hurrying back to the novel. An extraordinary exhausting ultimately incandescent in all senses version of this classic.
Simon Stephens has been exploring music and now dance in this piece inspired by his collaboration with choreographer Hofesh Schechter. Maureen Beattie’s intensely committed central performance is worth absorbing, the ensemble make flesh as much of Stephens’ text as could be asked. This feels like a text that needs to risk pushing through more specificity without fear of losing its suggestiveness.
Everything in Out of Blixen is realized with a magical economy. Kathryn Hunter’s s in her fluid element here, morphing into twelve-year-old girls and seasoned dowagers to her own directed paces The Europhilic Print Room has transformed the Coronet’s circular space into a consistent vision of theatre.
Stevenson’s performance mesmerises, appals, thrills and re-asserts her unique straddling of classic and unquiet modernist in a few dizzying months. Poised somewhere between Happy Days and inevitably Peter Pan, here she’s immobilised everywhere she flies, imprisoned far more than Winnie with her vectors of sand and invisibility. There’s no doubt Wings proves its life in the theatre here. It breaks new air.
