Once he was American theatre’s leading light, now he’s Steven Spielberg’s valued collaborator, though Tony Kushner says, ‘I still think of myself as a playwright rather than a screenwriter’. The phantasmagorical AIDS-era six-hour theatrical epic, ‘Angels in America’, brought him a 1993 Pulitzer Prize, a wave of acclaim and placed him into Spielberg’s sightlines. He came on board as co-writer of 2005’s Munich, and also wrote 2012’s Lincoln and 2021’s West Side Story. Their latest venture however, is a genuine mould-breaker within the Spielberg oeuvre, an accessible, ruminative and affecting jointly-authored original titled The Fabelmans, which lightly fictionalises Spielberg’s whizz-kid youth as a tyro amateur moviemaker while his parents’ marriage is on the brink of dissolution.
LWLies: There’s no historical context for this essentially domestic story, no genre trappings –…
