Monster work. Work world. Which we have already seen in full at the 1994 Avignon Festival, in a thrilling staging by Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman. Then in television series, from 2003, in an adaptation by Mike Nichols. Then in 2004 at the Châtelet, where the music of Péter Eötvös collided with the ambitious politico-mystical-historical-societal fresco of the American playwright Tony Kushner. Its division into short scenes, its hybrid character combining Shakespeare with Brecht, musical comedy with tragedy, ghosts with angels, and historical characters with anonymous people who died of AIDS allow the chameleon work to take on all possible formats. Since its creation in San Francisco in 1991, Angels in America, here finely translated by Pierre Laville for the Comédie-Française, continues to fascinate creators. Until the filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin, who fell in love with this saga in forty-four changes of scenes against a backdrop of ecological-existential crisis.
While a Machiavellian and corrupt lawyer, Roy Cohn, Jewish, homosexual and yet anti-Semitic and homophobic (Michel Vuillermoz, unfortunately more farcical than terrifying), we follow the destiny of two couples. One, homosexual, where the lover, Prior (Clément Hervieu-Léger, remarkably sensitive), is the victim of what was then called “gay cancer”. The other, Mormon, where the husband (Christophe Montenez, all of ambiguous fragility) turns out to be homo and the wife, victim of hallucinations. So many individuals lost in a maelstrom where coexist not only a deadly epidemic then taxed with divine punishment, but also the ruin of ideologies which leaves the world orphaned of all its beliefs and certainties. And Kushner brews AIDS, fall of the Berlin wall, end of communism around colorful characters, extravagance, suffering and madness. At the risk of sometimes turning into a gloubi-bulga where only the disorder of beings and things is finally said, his freedom, his insolence of writing are astonishing. Detonate.
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