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I remember Emma Thompson in it particularly, but I didnt remember much about it.
So I felt like the Angel shouldnt look pristine and clean and beautiful.
She should be something thats crawled out from under the rubble.
She may have had past glory, but its definitely decaying now.
Beth Malone, the Angel:I feel like the wordbugwas in the breakdown.
The analogy they were using to describe her was buglike, feral, cockroach-y.
Not your pretty angelic angel.
It was really fun to play with filtering-angel-through-bug.
Elliott:She maybe feels a bit feral, or monkey- or locustlike.
Angels can be feral and unpredictable and therefore scary.
So thats where it started from.
Finn Caldwell, puppetry designer and director; movement:Marianne and I have worked together for many years.
I was puppetry director ofWar Horse.
She came to me and said I want the Angel to be like nothing Ive seen before.
Will you have a think on it?
Even a weakened angel is still an enormously powerful being.
Compared to Prior, she could crush him like a grape at any moment.
And she isnt real.
Shes real to me, and to him.
Its a snake-eating-its-own-tail thing.
I really only exist because Prior needs me to.
The Wings
Caldwell:Immediately it was obvious that the wings were very exciting.
Elliott:We felt like the wings were a telltale sign of things the Angels not necessarily expressing vocally.
They made her very, I think Tony uses the wordother.
Caldwell: But theyre not gonna sustain onstage if you just think theyre flapping.
The audience will only be excited if theyre like a puppet with their own persona.
Is it a violent flap, is it a tiny tentative flap?
There are so many different ways the wings work.
They work emotionally, as protection, as weapons, as a mode of transportation.
Their modality is a huge spectrum.
The performers in London almost groaned when they got the real wings for the first time.
The performers in New York started with the real wings.
They become their own workout.
Its when they dont necessarily add [to the scene].
And of course she can be quite human.
Caldwell: The main time we see the Angel is in the Anti-Migratory Epistle.
The only thing in the room was a chair, so he picked it up.
Thats something we actually kept.
It shows how pathetic he is.
The great work begins.
But they get them unhooked pretty fast.
We had a big rehearsal making sure it was safe to do that.
Elliott:We wanted the wrestling [scene] to feel quite enormous and unjust.
A weak, ill human battling with this supernatural being with 12-foot wings.
Its 25 feet up in the air he goes, and hes just holding onto her with his hands.
I hope you see that and think it looks like she just takes off.
The coordination in that moment is off the scale.
So we took that into puppeteering humans when we did the Tori Amos musicalThe Light Princess.
The princess basically floats the entire time.
The wires are limiting and predictable.
We then used that technique a bit further inAngels in America.
Again, I just thought putting her on a wire would be boring.
Why shouldnt she have these kind of minions shadows that help her supernatural weirdness?
We talked about the shadows as particles of unwell.
They have the ability to look like theyre infesting or roiling on the stage.
To do that alongside puppeteering the wings was a big demand on the performers.
Thats when they disappear.
Caldwell:Theyre a combination of dancers and puppeteers, and they needed to be egoless.
There cant be a lot of Oh, I think I want to do it like this.
Weirdly, the Angel is sort of the captain.
The shadows probably all know each others roles inside out theyre super aware of everything happening onstage.
Its a very pedantic, slow, rigorous choreography that eventually becomes improvising something.
You have to look at the emotional register thats being played out.
Caldwell:Me and Steve, weve worked together before.
That was crucial to Marianne she needed to understand why things were moving a certain way.
I adore working at times visibly and at times invisibly.
She trusted that group entirely very quickly.
And in those situations, the group does behave accordingly.
They bring their A game very quickly.
Malone: Steven Hoggetts workshop-y moments in rehearsal were like, Behave like a virus.
A virus goes down many hallways before it reaches something it can destroy.
Thats the way the shadows were informed to move.
Those rehearsals were really intense and wild and kind of upsetting and disturbing also.
When are you asked, Go pick up that lamp, but do it like a virus?
I wonder if Baryshnikov was asked to do that.
Hoggett:Yeah, what the hell?
But she did do it, Ill say that for her!
The idea of infection and sterility.
Elliott:Beth was very good physically, which was of high importance.
She brought a very different quality I hadnt seen before; a kind of quirky, light sprightliness.
And she had to trust the shadows and throw herself into that.
People seem really amazed by it.
Hoggett:On a good day, when you watch that team come together, its really exciting.
It was a lot of figuring out what the minimum we could get away with was.
Malone: Whats more fun than flying around with a bunch of people lifting you?
Its totally worth it.
Its like,Wow, were achieving something great in real time.
