The Inheritance
Noel Coward Theatre, London

AIDS, sex, death, history, culture, politics, love, loss, compassion, community. How do young gay men come to terms with this whirlwind of issues?

Fortunately for those in Matthew Lopez’s play, EM Forster is at hand to anchor their present in the various pasts of their community. Lopez’s Inheritance, transferring to the Noel Coward Theatre from the Young Vic, loosely takes Forster’s Howard’s End as its inspiration but is more engaged with the present than this would suggest.

It follows Eric Glass (Kyle Soller), a young gay Jewish New Yorker, who comes to find himself at the intersections of different generations of gay men. His seven-year relationship with novelist, playwright and party boy Toby Darling is doomed, but his friendship with the dying Walter (Paul Hilton) and his budding relationship with Walter’s partner Henry (John Benjamin Hickey) are sources of personal growth and political challenge.

The play is highly successful in the way the political and cultural landscapes of Eric and his friends intertwine with a painful, difficult gay history and, when dealing with Aids, it is at its most beautiful, powerful and heartbreaking.

The Inheritance never lets us forget the lost generation of gay men condemned to death by government inaction and, as part one ends, heartbreaking stories of compassion, care and fear are brought to life when Eric visits Walter’s beloved house in upstate New York. Here, in a shocking and deeply upsetting theatrical moment, he is visited by all the Aids victims who Walter nursed as they died.

Without question this is a highly political piece of work, in which debates about the appropriation of gay culture and Trump’s presidency sizzle. At best, there’s a touch of George Bernard Shaw, but some of the more neoliberal political impulses go unchecked and, while the play's focus on beautiful, cis-gendered gay men has its justifications, sometimes it rankles, as when trans rights are name-checked but trans characters are absent.

The two parts of The Inheritance clock in at a mammoth six hours and 40 minutes, but director Stephen Daldry moves the production along with an urgent and affecting pace and there’s a vital political justification in giving the play's questions and relationships such space.

Runs until January 19, box office delfontmackintosh.co.uk.