A Call To Action

"It is easily the best play anyone has written in the last forty years, and it may even be... ,” Eamon Flack stops himself short here, the director perhaps sensing he is on the edge dividing widespread and more personal opinion, the significance of the play in question, Tony Kushner's two-part epic Angels In America, filling the silence. “You know,” Flack starts up again, this time earnestness in no way mistakable for hyperbole, “it's sort of one of the great plays in a very, very long time. So the opportunity to do it was a once in a lifetime kind of thing. You don't revile from a play like this; you take a very big jump off a cliff with it, happily.”

That opportunity began with Simon Stone, who was championing a production of the play directed by Flack – who in recent times at Belvoir has directed Babyteeth and As You Like It – in the programming department before his departure from the company.

In Part One, Millennium Approaches, Walter Prior is diagnosed as HIV positive, which results in his lover, a Jewish man named Louis Ironson, leaving him, soon to take up with Mormon Republican law clerk Joe Pitt. What follows is a series of struggles in search of reconciliation between public and private life, religion and sexuality, the self and relationships or society at large.

Flack says Australian theatre was perfectly poised for a production of Angels In America right now, with a newly risen batch of young actors who were “ripe and ready for the play” and an older generation who were now of an age to take on the other roles. “It was very clear to me very early on that there is an extraordinary young actor in this country, Luke Mullins, for whom here was a perfect role, and in which Luke could be completely, fully, at the height of his powers because here was one of the great roles of all time for a gay man,” says Flack.

What prompted Flack to happily take the jump on this epic undertaking – which is to be presented in repertory by Belvoir – was the continued prevalence of the issues under Kushner's examination: gender, sexuality and religion in contemporary society. Flack believes the 1980s, when the play is set, marked the start of a new era of public discussion and debate on such issues that continues to navigate this territory today.

“We're now in the thick of that era, and it isn't getting any clearer. Those questions that began back then, the way in which identity and politics and religion and global consciousness and individual freedom and collective responsibility totalised in the late '70s and early '80s is still what we're dealing with now.

“That hasn't changed, and in fact, it's gotten more complicated. We still have this great task as a society, and I do want to call it a society, and this play is about that task: what do we want to become? And how do we attempt to influence the seemingly imperturbable massive forces of seething historical oblivion that don't seem to want to be affected by the behaviour of individuals, but it must be or we're fucked.”