There’s an early Seamus Heaney poem that describes an elk skeleton as “an astounding crate full of air”. The phrase kept occurring to me as I watched The Inheritance: it’s an impressive piece of work, but almost completely empty.

Like Tony Kushner’s Angels In America, Matthew Lopez’s work is a sprawling two-parter (six roughly hour-long acts, spread over nine and a half hours on those days when both parts are staged), intended to anatomise the contemporary American gay community. However, the similarities pretty much end there. Kushner wrote about the era of AIDS, whereas Lopez struggles to give depth to its legacy. Kushner covered pretty much the entire social waterfront, whereas Lopez’s characters are, with one exception, ranged between comfortable middle-class and billionaire. Above all, Angels has an often dazzling sense of drama, whereas The Inheritance has virtually none: I’d estimate it’s a good 80% “tell” rather than “show”. Bob Crowley’s set doesn’t need any actual objects... not even a pulpit, although a couple of times characters metaphorically bash it like jackhammers, making crashingly unsubtle pronouncements about the social and political duties of gaydom.

Part of the reason for this concentration on narration is that the play is explicitly a modern gay American rewrite of E.M. Forster’s Howards End... and when I say “explicitly”, I mean that Forster appears as an onstage character, critiquing the narrative as it develops in the collective account of the dozen or so other men onstage. The only woman in the cast is Vanessa Redgrave, whose brief appearance in the final hour is a not-so-covert nod to her appearance in the Merchant/Ivory film version of Forster’s novel.

Director Stephen Daldry marshals the cast with both detail and sensitivity, led by Kyle Soller in fine form as Eric Glass, the man cheated out of the legacy of the house which (like Forster’s Howards End) symbolises hope and compassion throughout the tale. All in all, though, this is far too much time spent saying far too little of any substance. David Lan’s just-ended artistic directorship of the Young Vic was magnificent in all kinds of ways, but this piece of legacy programming threatens to conclude his time here on a down beat.

Written for the Financial Times.