“Angels in America”, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh
Mark Brown at the Edinburgh International Festival
★★★★★
20 August 2026
Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America (which is subtitled: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes) is, surely, one of the greatest American dramas of the twentieth century. The piece – which contemplates the horrifying impact of the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the 1980s – was famously adapted into a 2003 television mini-series starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson.
The drama is usually performed on stage in two parts over approximately eight hours. However, the famous production for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA) by Flemish theatre director Ivo van Hove manages to trim Kushner’s work down to five hours (including a 45-minute meal break).
It might seem counterintuitive that Kushner has proclaimed van Hove’s truncation – which was first presented in 2008 – to be his favourite staging of the piece. However, having experienced this extraordinary production – which ends its Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) run today – I can understand entirely the writer’s fondness for the ITA version.
Van Hove’s production is played – in Dutch with English surtitles – on a stripped-back stage. Locations and situations are evoked by way of unerringly effective video projections, while sets of lights suspended from the ceiling are lowered and raised as the action requires.
The primary props are a couple of turntables, which contribute often to a soundtrack consisting entirely of David Bowie songs (beginning, appropriately and poignantly, with Young Americans). The music – which is almost omnipresent in the piece – gives the staging a temporal momentum that underlines its resonance in our times.
That resonance is particularly strong with regard to the real-life character of Roy Cohn, the powerful McCarthyite lawyer, who – as we know from Ali Abbasi’s 2024 movie, The Apprentice – was, arguably, the single most important influence on the career of Donald Trump. Cohn – who is played here with devastating cynicism and self-regard by Hans Kesting – was a barely closeted homosexual (or, as he puts it in the play, “a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys”). He went to his death from AIDS insisting that he had cancer.
If Kesting’s performance is brutally compelling, there are superb performances across the piece, not least from Eelco Smits (as the young, gay man Prior Walter, who has AIDS), Minne Koole (as Louis Ironson, the lover who abandons Prior) and Jesse Mensah (as Belize, the nurse and former drag queen who is Prior’s dearest friend).
Smits’s playing epitomises a cast that is palpably committed, both to Kushner’s text and van Hove’s vision for it. He renders Prior with a shuddering sense of fear and unbearable disappointment.
Van Hove’s production is in a state of constant movement. As one scene plays out, the characters in the next are already walking on stage.
Indeed, not only do scenes flow almost seamlessly from one to the next, but some dialogues cut across each other in simultaneous performance. All of this fits perfectly with the drama’s shifts between anguished, often poetic realism and the world of dreams, nightmares and haunted consciences.
In the play’s metaphysical dimension, Marieke Heebink gives an outstanding, gloriously avenged performance as the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (the Communist activist executed, alongside her husband Julius, by the US federal state in 1953 – convicted of passing nuclear military secrets to the Soviet Union). Cohn always maintained that his greatest achievement was securing her execution.
The Cohn/Rosenberg plotline – woven, as it is, through a drama that also encompasses the conservative, repressed Mormon homosexual Joe Pitt (Krisjan Schellingerhout) and his prescription drug addicted wife Harper (Eefje Paddenburg) – is testament to the political and historical breadth of Kushner’s extraordinary work.
The EIF first tried to bring van Hove’s production here in 2018. The festival’s audience is fortunate indeed that it has finally been brought to the Edinburgh stage.
