All the Angels

by Nick Drake

A new play from the author behind the bestselling Rai Rahotep detective trilogy

Handel's Messiah is the world's most popular choral work. But its story begins in the unlikely setting of a room above a pub in Chester, when the great composer, detained by bad weather on his way to a season of concerts in Dublin, invites some local choristers to rehearse excerpts. It is not a success. So begins Handel's struggle to stage the premiere of his masterpiece, confronted by seemingly insurmountable challenges, including the tricky librettist Charles Jennens, the actress Susannah Cibber who he trains to sing the most moving arias, and the mysterious Crazy Crow.

Nick Drake’s divine, musical play premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, in June 2015. All the Angels was revived at same theatre in December 2016.

80 pages, Paperback

Published June 19, 2018

About the author

Nick Drake was born in 1961. He lives and works in London. His first book-length collection, The Man in the White Suit (Bloodaxe Books, 1999), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999, and was selected for the Next Generation Poets promotion in 2004. From The Word Go was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. His most recent projects include a stage adaptation of Philippe Petit’s To Reach the Cloud; the screenplay for the Australian film Romulus, My Father, starring Eric Bana, which won Best Film at the Australian Film Awards; Success, a play for the National Theatre's Connections project; and a trilogy of historical novels (Nefertiti, shortlisted for CWA Best Historical Crime Novel, Tutankhamun and Egypt: The Book of Chaos which Mammoth Screen are developing for TV). He is a screenwriter, and is also working the composer Tansy Davies and director Deborah Warner on an opera for ENO. In September 2010 he was invited to join Cape Farewell's trip to the Arctic to explore climate change, and from that journey arose a commission from United Visual Artists to create poems and texts for their ground-breaking installation High Arctic at the National Maritime Museum (2011). Those poems, together with others inspired by the Arctic and its voices, are gathered in his collection The Farewell Glacier (Bloodaxe Books, 2012).

Reviews

[Emma Knights · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting script to read. A lot of modern language mixed with old fashioned. It does have some beautiful lines about creating music and performing music. Would like to see it performed with the music that is present in the chorus part and the interludes across scene changes.