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

King’s theatre, Edinburgh
People, ideas and scenes wash over each other in Ivo van Hove’s masterly staging for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, performed here in Dutch

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 250^th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, Angels in America seems to predict and reflect the contradictory nation of today.