Walter Benjamin’s latest philosophical brain-bender gets a theatrical spin in Angel of History, a mind-melting show hitting Shanghai’s stages. Picture an angel, eyes glued to the past, watching ruins pile up—think sunken violins, glitching radars, beached whales—while a storm called “progress” yanks him forward through a surreal mess of dead babies, Antarctic statues, and glow-in-the-dark rabbits. He wants to pause, glue the chaos back into something that makes sense, but the storm won’t let him. The stage is a kaleidoscope of fragmented images—piano keys, atomic clouds, jungle postcards—mashing up history’s wreckage with a question: who can actually stop, piece together the broken bits, and dare to look forward? It’s a trippy, poetic jab at our fractured reality, asking if anyone—angel or not—can rebuild what’s lost.