Angels in America

This article first appeared in the Age on June 5, 2004

Angels in America (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 8.30pm, ABC) is one of the most audacious pieces of television you will see this year and perhaps for many years to come. Some of you will know Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway plays from when they came out as part of the Melbourne Festival a few years ago. If you have, you will be wondering how this theatre, which moves from the real to surreal, from the earthy to the spiritual, will translate to television. That it does is testimony to the remarkable team who bring this show to us. Kushner wrote the screenplay. It's directed by Mike Nichols. It stars Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson and a lesser known - but even stronger - support cast. Jeffrey Wright is simply extraordinary as the nurse Belize and Mr Lies. (As in theatre several of the cast play several roles.) Not surprisingly Angels has already won five Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and is a hot favourite for this year's Emmy Awards.

During the AIDS pandemic Ronald Regan wondered whether, "The Lord brought down this plague... [because] illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments." His administration is the social context for this exploration of AIDS in the years 1985 to 1990. AIDS is a disease that engulfs the innocent, such as Prior Walter (Kirk) and flings others, such as real life Attorney Roy Cohn (Pacino), out of the closet though he'll swear he's no faggot until his dying breath. Cohn was a Republican nightmare who came to fame when he enabled the execution of the Rosenberg's. The ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep) is one of the few people who come to this man's death bed and Streep is just wonderful both as Ethel and as Hannah Pitt, a strait-laced woman who knows a real angel when she sees one.

Prior Walter's medication-induced hallucinations introduce him to two of his ancestors bought down by plague in the Middle Ages and Eighteenth Century, as well as into realms where angels (notably Emma Thompson) attempt to keep things going in a Godless age. Walter is joined in his hallucinations by the valium addicted Harper, (Mary-Louise Parker) whose husband Pitt (Patrick Wilson) is a Mormon, in the closet, and works for Cohn. The hallucination scenes are beautiful, theatrical and powerful.

The sweep of Angels in America, its constant move between the personal, the political and the metaphysical, is poetry. Not every moment comes off -Thompson's Angel doesn't always convince - but I love the way this show wrestles with ideas of the spirit. Harper is well performed but two-dimensional. Inevitably the material loses its political edge now we are two decades away from the particular horrors of AIDS beginnings and Regan's administration. At times the use of AIDS as a metaphor for larger things can blind us to that disease's work a day terrors. But Walter's desire to live past hope, to continue to love is a real moment of joy. It is those who call upon love that are America's angels Kushner contends, and it those who invoke God with meanness in their hearts that are the Godless ones.

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