The Inheritance review (Image: PH)
Six hours and forty minutes in a theatre?
Even the play itself make a meta-mockery of such an idea: “Four hundred pages of script? That’s seven hours. Who would sit through that?”
The entire audience chuckled but I guarantee not one person was regretting a single moment spent in the Gielgud theatre immersed, enchanted and enraptured by one of the great glories of the modern stage across two parts. I saw it all in one day but the sobbing gentleman behind me had been across two nights and the impact was clearly no less powerful.
Trying to describe the experience afterwards to friends I compared it to binge-watching a truly great Netflix drama. This is great theatre but it is not high art or thee-ayter. It is literary, profound and, yes, a pitiless examination of modern culture but it is also warm, outrageous, gentle, sexy and a little soapy. It breaks your heart, oh how it breaks your heart, and more than once – but it does not leave you without hope. It is an affirmation of the power of art and the strength of the human spirit.
Comparisons to the equally marathon and seminal Angels in America are inevitable and appropriate. But each is a work of its time.
Angels was a raw raging against the horror that cut down a gay community just beginning to find itself for the first time in an uncaring world. The Inheritance inherits a new world where advances in medication and social attitudes have accomodated some acceptance and one-time unimaginable freedoms but left a new generation without a clear purpose and still undermined by the ghosts of its past. It is a generation facing a new surge in alienation and fear as the characters onstage watch Donald Trump’s election in mounting horror and disbelief.
The modern day story is ostensibly a reworking of EM Forster’s Howards End, rooted in a thwarted legacy, but its wider story presents a group of young men, ostensibly with the world at their feet, who have inherited the echoes of the AIDS era and the communal crippled legacy of every child made to feel different, unworthy, unloved and unlovable.
The Inheritance review; Vanessa Redgrave and Samuel Levine (Image: PH)
The Inheritance: Kyle Soller, Samuel H Levine & Andrew Burnap (Image: PH)
Directed by Stephen Daldry, who knows a thing or two about mixing high art and mainstream entertainment, Matthew Lopez’s play debuted at the Young Vic this year and has transferred to the West End for a limited run into January. Do not miss it.
The final act appearance of Vanessa Redgrave as Margaret is the undeniable casting coup. She is the only woman on stage throughout the night and represents the play’s entire journey and its catharsis. The devoted mother who rejected her gay son before a deathbed reunion opened up a new life of service to other dying boys, her story is the universal truth of learning through loss, love and new life through death.
Her performance is simply the icing, though. The entire cast is staggering in its commitment, conviction and communication of humanity in all its glory and ignominy.
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Samuel H Levine’s Adam opens the saga, stumbling into a group of arty privileged men who are challenged by Morgan (Paul Hilton), the ghost of EM Forster, to write their own stories, to find their own truths.
The central conceit finds them by turn inventing/narrating what unfolds, barefoot on an almost blank stage. It could have been a pretentious and, indeed, conceited conceit but instead agilely blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, past and present to find the beating heart of a bruised generation – and the one that came before.
Levine’s phenomenal performance actually also takes in Adam’s lookalike Leo, an abused hustler facing a grim end. Levine hands over the narrative midway from Adam to Leo in a flawless scene, playing both characters simultaneously.
The focal point of it all, compulsively seeking a spotlight he craves and dreads, is Toby Darling, played with extraordinary depth, dazzle and pathos by Andrew Burnap. A gilded creature of his own creation, even his name seems a fanciful fiction until it is revealed as yet another stolen and broken part of his childhood.
In a play of ravishing performances, Burnap was the one who broke my heart, spiralling inexorably towards a tragedy he helped create but does not deserve.
The Inheritance: Andrew Burnap (Image: PH)
Darling’s devoted boyfriend Eric Glass is played by Kyle Soller, in the role that underpins the entire saga. He provides a quiet strength he does not quite believe he has, which carries the audience along with (almost all) the other characters safely to the very end.
Glass is the spiritual heir to the previous generation, to those lost in the AIDS epidemic and to a couple – Walter (Hilton, again) and Henry (John Benjamin Hickey) – torn apart not by infection but by their opposing reactions to the virus ravaging their community. Walter embraces the dying, giving them a sanctuary in his home and beneath its cherry tree. Henry flees the horrors of it all, losing his lover and much of his humanity in the process.
Eric’s first visit to that house years later is the climax of Part 1 and left me and everyone around me struggling to contain sobs at the exquisite, almost unbearable theatrical coup de grace unfolding before our blurry eyes.
Kyle Soller, Paul Hilton and John Benjamin Hickey (Image: PH)
The Inheritance cast (Image: PH)
I entered the theatre fearful I would be bored or frustrated by an overly self-conscious and self-important piece of wannabe art – and open to the possibilitity of not returning for Part 2.
Instead Part 1 whirled by in a prefct balance of artistry and artifice. The performances are mesmerising, allowed to shine by the beautifully simple staging, holding back brief reveals of the house, the cherry tree, a burning letter or Fire Island pool party for maxiumum impact.
With an interval or break every hour or so, it really is like watching a consuming six-part drama where there is no question you must see the next chapter right away. I cried more than once, laughed, squirmed a little at the sexual descriptions (never shown but oh so evocative), ached for the lost souls, recognised their flaws, hoped for their salavation and accepted their fall. And, yes, cried again.
This is not simply theatre. This is life, and oh how it makes you want to live. There can be no higher praise.
THE INHERITANCE IS AT THE GIELGUD THEATRE UNTIL JANUARY 19
FOR TICKETS AND MORE INFO GO TO: WWW.INHERITANCEPLAY.COM