The Inheritance review: A big-hearted tribute to the power of storytelling

1/9
Henry Hitchings29 March 2018

Matthew Lopez’s witty, frequently outrageous and deeply moving play has a startling ambition. Across two parts that span seven hours it’s a kaleidoscopic vision of gay life in New York — eloquent about love, longing, risk and fear, while also raising knotty questions about how much of the world we can ever truly know.

At first the characters seem to be a kind of writers’ group. They’re under the spell of E M Forster — whose novel Howards End is Lopez’s chief inspiration — and Paul Hilton sets the tone as their inquisitive mentor. Yet although some of them continue to serve as a chorus, a far more expansive story develops, switching between camp extravagance, raw emotion and earnest debate.

Its central figures are Kyle Soller’s Eric and his wickedly funny, horrendously vain boyfriend Toby (Andrew Burnap). Both performances are piercingly vivid, and as their entanglements become more complex there’s thrilling work around them, especially from Samuel H Levine, who doubles as slippery actor Adam and his troubled lookalike Leo. Incredibly, we don’t encounter a female character until six hours have elapsed, but then there’s a fragile poignancy in Vanessa Redgrave’s portrait of a mother treasuring the memory of the dead son she misunderstood.

Stephen Daldry directs with rigorous simplicity and affords the writing plenty of breathing space to amplify Forster’s concerns: class, freedom, property, the idea of legacy, and above all the principle that we need to connect — by forging bonds with others, and by finding ways to bridge the gap between pragmatism and our passions.

Given Lopez’s interest in the apocalyptic effects of AIDS and the ghostly echoes of history, comparisons with Tony Kushner’s sprawling modern classic Angels in America are inevitable. But The Inheritance has a bruising seriousness and salty charisma that are very much its own. A big-hearted tribute to the power of storytelling, it’s also the sort of play that invites you to think afresh about what it means to lead a purposeful life.

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