I'd been feeling like revisiting Angels in America, and now that I have, I can speculate about why that was - a feeling of Zeitgeist in the air, the sense that an end of times of sorts is approaching, questions of law and justice and the difference between them unavoidable, a growing urgency in the tension between stasis and progress coupled with increasingly yawning fault-lines in the notion of progress itself, and America at the heart of it.
I encountered the play through the National Theatre 'live' version a couple of years back, and this time I found myself reading the play text and watching the 2003 HBO miniseries with its murderers' row of talent across many of the key roles (notably Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, Meryl Streep as Hannah and Ethel Rosenberg, Emma Thompson as the Angel, Mary-Louise Parker as Harper, Patrick Wilson as Joe, and James Cromwell in the smaller role of Cohn's doctor) in parallel with each other.
Prior, Louis, Harper, Joe, and the monstrous Cohn are characters who linger in the memory, their personalities and actions reverberating with a force that's individual to them and not just referable to the lofty themes with which they're woven - some of which I mentioned earlier, along with desire, prophecy, theory, history, responsibility and love. It's human at every turn, while convincing in its rendition of angels - and funny, too, while never sentimental. The play is a true modern classic, and the HBO version maybe comes as close to doing it justice as could be imagined.
