Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Part 1, Millennium Approaches

One of the plays I’ve seen this year was Homeland, a New Zealand drama that does an excellent job of exactly recreating a particular place and person – an old man on a farm, no longer coping but unwilling to admit it, and his family’s (local son & daughter-in-law, big city daughter with son-in-law and granddaughter) attempt to move him into residential care. The setting was amazingly familiar, the dialogue realistic, the characters recognisable, and all in all it was like spending two hours watching the equivalent period of someone else’s life – which is unfortunately not at all what I go to the theatre for. What I like about drama is that it’s shaped and selected; that it contrives to create truth and realism from the obvious artificiality of a stage, that the dialogue is sharp and polished, that the characters are unexpected and still believable; in short, what I like about drama is that it’s theatrical.

So. I recently re-read Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, which is one of my favourite plays and which in no way suffers from any lack of theatricality.( Angels in America. )