Published: 09 September 2010
by HOWARD LOXTON

THIS Guthrie Theatre production, brought over from the States, is made up of five one-act plays by Tony Kushner (who wrote Angels in America). 

They are a somewhat zany mixture that ranges from a duologue between two dead women (a deposed Albanian queen and a singer who claims to have recorded an album on the Moon) to former First Lady Laura Bush reading Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to the ghosts of dead Iraqi children.

They are wickedly funny and yet deadly serious; what on the surface could be just revue sketches carry much more weight and become a biting commentary on the American psyche by one of its most acute observers. 

Kushner has a bizarre and fertile imagination that places real, sometimes famous people in surreal situations. 

Dead Queen Geraldine, for instance arriving on the Moon in the Mercedes that Hitler gave her (fact), wondering if it is Purgatory and finding herself slipping Gestapo salutes into a Vaudeville dance routine led by eccentric entertainer Lucia Pamela. We meet Nixon’s shrink, still treating him in heaven and taking on some of his psychoses. 

There is another psychiatrist, herself in need of help, faced with a former patient, along with their old lovers, who are begging her to restart sessions with  him – a satire inspired by one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. 

There is the story of a real right-wing tax avoidance scheme that escalates to involve a huge swathe of NYPD, and the chilling but brilliant image of Mrs Bush becoming the conscience of America as she explains to children just why they had to die.

Director Tony Taccone gives it near-perfect timing  and a smooth, unfussy but good-looking production.

The piece is brilliantly played by Jim Lichtscheidl  (as all the many characters in the tax avoidance story 

and the patient’s gay lover), Valeri Mudek (Geraldine, Psychiatrist, Recording Angel, Laura Bush), Kate Eifrig (Pamela, the Psychiatrist’s girlfriend and the children’s guardian angel) and JC Butler (Nixon’s shrink and the other psychiatrist’s patient). 

One not to miss.

Until September 25 • 020 7328 1000