At seven hours, split over two evenings, The Inheritance may seem a daunting proposition for theatre-lovers short of free time.
Here is a sprawling saga about a ‘coven’ of implausibly good-looking gay men in Manhattan and their receding group memory of the Aids epidemic of the Eighties.
Seven hours! But with its soap-opera plot and some phenomenally good acting, the show whizzes along.
The story is grafted on to E.M. Forster’s Howards End, in which a dreamy house acquires a force of its own. In Forster, it was an English country home. Here, it is a rural upstate New York colonial clapboard with a centuries-old cherry tree in its garden.
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