Symbol of a nightmare society

Royal National Theatre Angels in America: “Millennium Approaches” In repertoire

In her book AIDS as Metaphor the New York critic Susan Sontag deplores the habit of endowing disease with all manner of symbolic qualities: Medicine and moralising must not be mixed. Tony Kushner's play might almost have been written in direct defiance of her dictum. For it is a wrenching dramatisation of a generation of America shaken to its core by the experience of AIDS: explicit suffering and waste, the anguish and anger that AIDS has generated, and its tragic tendencies to betrayal and blight.

“Millennium Approaches” focuses on a gay couple, Louis and Prior, whose relationship breaks up when Prior develops the first signs of Kaposi's …