Third Angel

Imagine a place better than where you are.

Every day they come in and try again.
They try to figure out how to live together.
They try to find a place to be.
They start to build something that will never be completed — at least, not within their own lifetimes.

And every day it works.
Or it doesn’t.
Well, it depends how you measure it.

So today — today they will try something different.

The Paradise Project is full of wit, intelligence and humanity. Join Third Angel (Sheffield) & mala voadora (Lisbon) for a show about following instructions, inventing your own rules and keeping trying.

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sharp writing, great performance, and excellent scenography… It is interesting to note that conception and design of The Paradise Project is credited jointly to both collaborating companies and the two performers, implying that the creation of the design was an intrinsic part of the devising of the piece. This is how it feels – words, physical action, and visual imagery seamlessly interweaved. Both actors are totally at home in their stage environment, a delight to watch and listen to – you really do forget they are acting a lot of the time, which is perhaps the highest compliment. Total Theatre

engaging with the big issues about how we live with a fierce intelligence The Guardian

★★★★ sublime, moving… Killick and Sampson are an endearing and consistently engaging double act The List

★★★★ a slippery hour of theatre… a new Adam and Eve facing a brave new world with kitchen sink dignity Time Out

★★★★ the carefully witty and satirical script and the actors’ lovely improv-feel delivery become quite addictive, and quite illuminating The Skinny

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Download the full performance text of The Paradise Project here. 

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You can read Performance as (Re)construction: mala voadora and Third Angel’s Projeto Paraíso / The Paradise Project, Francesca Rayner’s in depth reflection on the show in Contemporary Portuguese Theatre: Criticism and Performance (2010 - 2016) (Edições Colibri, 2017).

The Paradise Project was the second collaboration between Third Angel and mala voadora following the project that produced both What I Heard About the World and Story Map.

In much of Third Angel’s work over the years there was a yearning for something better. Sometimes that was an escapism, sometimes a dream of how things might have turned out differently. Working with mala voadora on What I Heard About the World, we gathered stories from all across the globe. We spent a lot of time thinking about individuals in their own stories.

So when mala voadora proposed a suite of shows exploring the idea of Paradise – each one a collaboration with a different company – we knew it made sense as the next step in our collaboration. We spent a lot of time thinking about the differences between utopia and paradise, and exploring how these things might be presented on stage. 

Early on we were lucky enough to be supported by Warwick Arts Centre, which meant we were able to meet a number of academics and researchers from the fields of sociology, mathematics, art history, technology, politics and theology who visited us in the devising room and shared their thinking with us. They really helped our understanding of the territory we were exploring, particularly that utopia is a journey, whilst paradise is a destination.

Within all this we found a human story – two individuals trying to build something better. We liked the contrast in scale. Two people with a job to do every day. It’s just that their job is to try to build a better world. They examine society as a whole from voting systems and human rights to basic needs for survival.

The show was designed so that it could be presented by different combinations of performers from the two companies, Person A and Person B, and five different combinations of casts appeared in Lisbon, Warwick, Edinburgh and Sheffield (where it was performed to graphics and illustration students and staff at Sheffield Hallam University as part of an on-going collaboration there).

Overall The Paradise Project takes an optimistic view of the human race’s ability to build and strive for better through two characters as they take on the task of building a new utopia.The show continued to evolve as it toured, with the characters’ awareness of what they were doing, and their mechanism of recording the stories they tell of imperfect utopias changing from one iteration to the next.