An Age of Angels

Mark Soper, creator and sole perfomer of the Guy Masterson-produced An Age of Angels, knew he was onto something when he saw a child’s football go flying over a 20ft high chain-link fence. This single event, transformed here into a moment of transcendence, the blurring of innocent hopefulness with often corrupt experience, draws together the lives of ten LA residents, raising the question: can any man ever be an island?

It’s an ambitious, if not entirely original, project, and the overwhelming creative control Soper has over the project renders it something of a mixed bag. His exhausting portrayal of the various characters is especially so. Soper is undeniably an awe-inspiring performer, able to morph from lisping paedophile via hyperactive cheerleader to stressed executive, all perfectly conceived and convincing, within seconds. His delivery, however, often becomes overly rapid and fuddled, rendering it something of an acquired taste.

The same deduction can, broadly, be made in relation to the script. An Age of Angels’ central conceit, that the football flying over the fence of the playground into an urban hinterland, drawing together the fates of the diverse characters, to ultimately, and violently, illustrate the unavoidable communality of human experience, is hardly simplistic. The play’s events, related by each character in turn, are always clear. Soper’s attempts at showcasing the varied bleakness of human experience are, on the other hand, entirely opaque, meaning that value judgements, and the extraction of any kind of message, are pretty much ruled out. The closing pronouncement, that "the little things do add up," is in this way apt: the necessary bittiness of An Age of Angels’ presentation of human experience means its message gets lost in the posturing.