The Message

Adapted by Nigel Charnock from texts by Tony Harrison, Fergal Keane, Primo Levi, HH Munro, Charles Resnikoff and Wiliam Shakespeare

"We have witnessed terrible things, we have experienced such horrors, please tell them, tell them what happened."

Blinded with grief, lost for words—how can we speak the unspeakable? What is the language beyond the scream?

Volcano delivers The Message—a disturbing account of hell on earth from Greek tragedy to the suicidal nineties. Volcano tells it like it was and how it shall be—a history of blood from the sword to the soul.

Using Tony Harrison's Oresteia as the basis of the show, Volcano examined the role of the Messenger as a contemporary and historic witness to man's terrible cruelty. Using sources as diverse as Shakespeare, Paul Celan, Fergal Keane and Charles Resnikoff, we sought to trace a dialectic between good and evil.

Mewing warcries
Preybirds shrilling
Nest-theft childloss
Wild frustration
Nestling snaffled preybirds
Roarings
Birthpangs nothing
Nestcare nothing
Nothing fostered nestlings
Nothing
Crying mewing preybirds
Shrilling

The Message opened on 29 January 1997 at Warwick Arts Centre, and toured the UK for fifteen weeks.

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