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Paradise Lost

Milton’s Paradise Lost provided a starting point for a meditation on the relationship between humanity and the resources of the earth. Where the great poem is a symphonic retelling of scripture, Seven Angels was grown from fragments, shards of the poem, as if that huge incandescent structure had toppled from its seat in heaven and shattered into glimpses, dreams, strange tales, lost threads, all strewn across a broken landscape.

In the world of Paradise Lost, we know the story, we know the outcome, we know what Milton intends: the glorious pentameters sound the inevitability of the Devils’ fall from Heaven, Man’s fall from Eden, the Redemption through Christ. Seven Angels grows in a world without inevitability, without known story or outcome, with forms and rhythms that slide and mutate, with causes unclear and effects unknown. This world.

Glyn Maxwell

The Story

Seven figures find themselves on a desert, having dropped out of the sky. They are angels, abandoned by God, forgotten by Satan, passed over by Milton, fallen out of history. They have fallen for so long they no longer know who punished them, who they are, where they are, or why. The land is scorched and barren, the air thick with poison. Shadows war perpetually on every horizon.

They think they hear a creature, crying on the wind. They wonder – is it looking for us? In panic, the seven try to piece together a story to make sense of what has happened in this place. They make a series of rapid deductions: if the creature is crying, there must have been a better time, a beautiful past, when the desert was a garden. The story gains its own momentum as the figures transform themselves into characters…

In the Garden there lives a King and a Queen, and they give birth

to a Prince. They love the Prince so much that they give him

whatever he desires. They feed him the fruits of the Garden, and

they are served by a Royal Household.

Word of the Garden is carried around the world on the wind.

In time, out of lands ravaged by famine, war, and tyranny, three

delegates travel towards the Garden seeking plenty, peace, and

mercy. The King and Queen, wishing to keep the delights of the

Garden to themselves, close its gates.

The Household, exhausted by the demands of the spoiled Prince,

the closure of the Garden, and the failing of the palace stores,

start quitting, one by one, leaving only an exhausted Waitress.

The Prince notices the Waitress for the first time, and falls in love

with her. She persuades him that they must re-open the Garden,

in order to feed the people beyond the gates of the palace.

The King chairs a summit meeting, as the three Delegates

arrive from their desperate homelands, one ruined by industrial

despoliation, one by war, and one by fanaticism. They plead

for help from the King and his Garden, as the Waitress serves

them the last three meals in the world. As the food runs out, the

Delegates discover that the Garden is itself a wasteland, and the

Queen’s belief in ‘an infinity of plenty’ a delusion that science

will save the earth somehow.

The story collapses along with the hope that the Garden

represented. The characters dissolve back into angels falling

through space – but two of them remember their story, believe

in it, and refuse to abandon the world. The Prince and the

Waitress leave the palace and head out into the desert, to join the

nameless, numberless folk beyond the gates.