EM Forster’s seminal novel Howards End has been adapted many times including into film and more recently into a novel, but it has never been quite so originally reinterpreted as in The Inheritance, coming up at ACT Hub.

Not since the 2008 production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at the ANU Arts Centre have we needed to contemplate bringing a thermos and a meal because Matthew López’s blockbuster play demands two three-hour viewing slots. 

López has gone a step further, looking into the love that dared not be named back in Forster’s time. Taking a leaf from the famous novelist’s own closeted private life, he turned several of the heterosexual protagonists in the novel into gay male figures in the post-AIDS era. 

And it hit the spot. Although it began life as a commission in Hartford, Connecticut, it was publicly staged by Stephen Daldry in London in 2018 and lauded by the UK Daily Telegraph as the most important American play of the century. An American production and subsequent Tony awards followed.

Why? Because López’s story of intertwining relationships and classes provides a way, particularly for gay audience members, to look back and ask: “How far have we come and what do we owe to our forebears?”

Jarrad West, who with the late Liz Bradley, co-directed that 2008 production of Angels in America, came across the script in a London bookshop and has been semi-sitting on it for the last few years, holding the occasional loungeroom reading.

Now his big moment has arrived and, with a top-class team of actors, he’s staging the play for Everyman Theatre.

Not least among those actors is Andrew Macmillan, raised in Canberra’s southside and an early apprentice in shows such as Anything Goes, South Pacific and The History Boys.

After a stint at Queensland University of Technology, he got into London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, graduated after three years and hasn’t looked back.

In fact, this is a flying visit from Macmillan, although he’ll stay on to perform in a production of A Balloon Will Pop At Some Point During This Play at ACT Hub, but he fully intends to get back into the thick of a career in the UK after that is finished.

When I catch up with Macmillan for coffee, he tells me that The Inheritance is “like a Netflix six-part series” with six chunks in two parts, performed over 22 nights allowing audiences to choose how they will view it. 

He sees the play as the “spiritual successor to Angels in America,” although that play was set in the midst of the early HIV-AIDS crisis whereas The Inheritance roughly covers the years 2015 to 2022.

“The whole thing strikes me as being about post-traumatic stress, a big What Now?” he says.

“It’s a large-scope play with lots of characters, but fundamentally a group of young, gay men grappling with their identities and asking what is their inheritance.”

And although it’s set around New York, there is a house in the play that bears a resemblance to the English Howards End.

Some theatre stalwarts, like me, will choose to see the two plays on the same day, but it is certainly not intended to be torture and Macmillan is adamant that there is little off-putting self-pity in The Inheritance.

“It doesn’t discount that we are living in a better time now, although there is still work to be done, just look at the neo-masculinist resurgence involving figures like Andrew Tate,” he says.

“Gay people now have full rights and legal opportunities and this script is very good at having a conversation with itself, it’s not preachy and there are lots of different points of view.”

Illustrating that point, he says, is a one of the highlight characters, writer Toby Darling, played by Joel Horwood, “a bit of a lost boy,” is “so likeable but a mess, who makes impulsive decisions while alienating the people who should be helping him.”

Of Macmillan’s two roles, Leo is an updated version of one of the pivotal characters in Forster’s novel – Leonard Bast, the lower-class outsider who finds himself ill-accepted by the Bloomsbury-type intellectual sophisticates of the story.

And should we be bringing our tissues? Maybe, Macmillan advises, but the play is also very funny – “you need it with a play that long”.

The Inheritance, ACT Hub, Kingston, October 12-November 2. Unsuitable for audiences under 18. Session details at acthub.com.au