Minimalism within the Epic
Thoughts on Ivo van Hove's adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America

For me, Angels in America is one of the top five plays of the 20th Century. If you haven’t read it, you’re absurd. Directors may dream to stage the text, but the momentous challenge of doing so is like wrestling with the angel itself. Could a director ever conquer such a text? Perhaps the answer is all guns blazing, Marianne Elliott achieved greatness in 2017 with a multicoloured spectacle. In contrast, Ivo van Hove created a simple expansive space populated only by actors and a projector.

The curtain has once again come down on Hove’s Angels in America at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, originally staged in 2008. If you’re thinking you’re going to lap up the epic feast that Elliott served, you’ll go starving. Evidently, like most things, there’s a spectrum to Epic theatre. Hove gives a different kind of Epic: a minimalist buffet balancing power and subtlety and yet maintaining the vital expansiveness of the Epic. Minimalism couldn’t be further away from Kushner’s text, and yet as we well know an actor, a watcher and an empty space is ‘all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged’ (Brook). 

Below, I consider the effect of the minimalist style of Hove’s adaptation, its staging of Queerness and how that may impact a contemporary audience. I assume my thoughts are mainly interesting for directors as I focus on the world created through aesthetic and theatrical style. Although I hope the below is also engaging for people who know the play, and invite people to respond with their own thoughts if they’ve seen any staging of the play, especially Hove’s own. 

Kushner's subtitle for the play is 'A gay fantasia on National Themes', essentially making its Zeitgeist as plain as day. The word fantasia connotes with magical images, queerness, and of course Micky Mouse in Disney’s own 1940 Epic. However, its definition doesn’t quite match this aesthetic idea which we may have. 

On first read, its definition isn’t exclusively queer, evidently also not for Kushner as why specify Angels to be a ‘gay fantasia’? However, its etymology derives from the latin phantasia, meaning fantasy, an often attractive realm for queer audiences as a form of escapism. For the purpose of clarity going forward I refer to the dramaturgical layering of Angels as fantasia, and its form as phantasia. Every character in Angels attempts to avoid a painful reality by reaching for fantasy, perhaps the exception being the prophetic Prior as his journey ironically becomes closer with reality. The alchemy of fantasy and surreality are embedded within the play’s dramaturgy as Kushner elaborately wrights interweaving plots in his distinctive voice.

Directing Kushner’s work requires bravery if you want your vision to stand alone and forge its own lane, but it takes genius for that lane to run parallel with the text and not veer into uncertainty. What Hove does interestingly is deny the temptation of staging phantasia and instead, offers an ‘empty’ space which feels cavernous. Monochromatic lighting and a stage looking not too dissimilar from a school sports hall could not feel further away from fantasy. Hove comments on the effect he wants this to have:

For a text which offers a theatrical feast, why opt against spectacle? Is spectacle not phantasia? 

Kushner writes characters who find loopholes within their normative world in order to survive or satisfy desire. Hove’s stage is bland and conformist with stripes of shadows traversing the stage left to right. Queer characters on a bland stage is perhaps oxymoronic, but consequently also an emphasis on their struggle to survive in a world not designed for them. The stage resists facilitating the actor's performance: hands were used as phones, multi-rolling was aesthetically undefined and the floor became a surface for sitting, fucking or writhing in pain. No chairs or hospital beds, Roy Cohn's death bed was the cold hard stage itself. Some may look down on this seemingly primitive choice of staging, perhaps a similar prejudice which scapegoats a lack of creativity on to low-budgets, but this bare theatricality is Hove asking us to imagine. 

The actor’s un-melodramatic performance minimised their bodies within the space, they appeared as fragile humans rather than archetypal figures. Their understated performance became all the more charged, even desperate, as they had nothing else but words and their bodies to create Kushner’s world. Humour, love and emotional peril became all the more transparent, achieving a closeness between the actor and audience. A cast of seven brilliant actors fought to fill the space with such emotion and power, the effect being as above, mesmerising and hypnotising. 

in 2017, Elliott did an outstanding job of transporting the audience from New York to Antarctica; her surreal yet literal staging of setting meant that sets appeared and elegantly disappeared soon after, having had an episodic effect. Thus, like its queerness, Elliott's production displays the contrast of Angel’s fantasia more clearly. In Hove’s production, scenes started in shadow which in time became illuminated and the lack of set caused the boundaries of scenes to bleed into each other. Settings like the street, the hospital and Antarctica all looked similar due to the lack of exclusive space, this lack of scenographic specificity revealed a fantasia of palimpsests from each scene. Hove’s settings weren’t as defined as Elliott’s, but adopted a fluidity to create an ontological friction of ideology, morality and identity.

Hove’s minimalist design directs our focus to the text and demands the audience to embellish the production with our own imagination. Hove asks us to mine for the queerness if we are to play our part as audience; theatre is an arena of exchange, sometimes we do have to meet it halfway. Elliott’s production is stylishly defined by phantasia as we don’t have to work too hard for our dinner, but when the lights come down and we step outside, reality is a lot less technicolour. In contrast, Hove’s aesthetically bland world distances phantasia and hands artistic license to our imagination. As we leave the theatre, we see the colour of our own reality more and are reminded not to take advantage of the queer emancipation that’s been fought for. 

To me, Hove’s Angels ushers us away from temporary performance and towards the phantasia to be found in our own lives. Although there must always be balance as hell comes in tandem, thus the ‘grotesque’ within the definition of fantasia. It’s on us to remember where we’ve been and how we may be circling back, therefore raises the question: is Angels dated or timeless? 

Of course it’s dated, the text doesn’t acquire the same adaptability as Othello or Much Ado for example. In part Angels is a history lesson, and the subject's historic trauma should not be forgotten. Kushner himself wishes for his play to outlast him (xi, Kushner), of course Angels will remain eternally relevant for its spotlight on a formatively historic moment for the queer community, however relevance does not always mean timeless. This play is anchored in history, although one may argue such a dated text becomes timeless when society repeats the the very issues at the centre of a play’s discourse. I argue the timelessness of the play will only remain if our global society continues on its projected path, On reflection then, if global society continues to stumble down its current path, Angels has never felt more timeless. 

I started with Peter Brook’s most famous quote, only fitting I should bookend this essay with another:

For the director, the dance between reality and myth could not be more equivocal within Angels. I’ve suggested the actor's power of performance within Hove’s production is achieves the ‘closeness of reality’. Distance within Hove’s minimalist production is created through the bare negative space between the actors and the stage they inhabit. It leaves the audience looking for what’s missing, that being the aesthetic queerness saturated within works like Heartstopper and the spectacle of Elliott’s own 2017 production. 

The National Theatre production is a perfect example of staging myth and reality through spectacle and brilliant performance, however subconsciously suggests that theatre is the closest we get to mythic spectacle. A similar spectacle can be found within reality, but you have to work a lot harder to find it, even harder to fight for it. Whether a hero or a villain, that fight is within every character of Angels and by highlighting what they say and do. The gesture of Hove's production is essentially an exchange: first in the theatre, witness queer immortality via a closeness to character; the other part is discovering the spectacle outside. We need to defend Queer emancipation more than ever before - if you can find it, bathe in it; if it's lost, fight for it. 

Works cited

Brook, P. (2008). The Empty Space. London Penguin Books.

Definition of FANTASIA. (n.d.). In: www.merriam-webster.com. [online] Available at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fantasia. 

Definition of fantasia. (2025). In: Collinsdictionary.com. [online] HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Available at: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/fantasia [Accessed 5 May 2025]. 

Kushner, T. (2017). Angels in America. Nick Hern Books.

Memran, M. (2014). Tony Kushner Gives Rave Review of Stripped-Down, David Bowie-ized Production of Angels in America. Vanity Fair. Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/10/angels-in-america-bam-ivo-van-hove [Accessed 5 May 2025].