The Message

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from sonething he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

"My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back,
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck."
Walter Benjamin


The Message began with an idea of Tony Harrison's involving the role of The Messenger in fiction and history from Greek drama to the present day. Our intention was to look at "the language beyond the scream" using the formula of the great early dramatists Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles.

The Message grew and changed in our hands during the making of the piece: for both practical and personal reasons we moved further away from our original intentions. It began to dawn on us that we were more interested in The Messenger as a witness and living testimony to events rather than as an anonymous reporter. The messenger's task was essentially a humanistic one, an appeal to what is common in the life of man, an ontological claim that might bind us to the essentials of the human project. Of course, this kind of humanistic claim is unfashionable nowadays, but it seemed to us to connect the cycles of slaying that the Greek tragedies tell, and to represent those Renaissance moments in human history where good has triumphed over evil.

The formula of the messenger speech was rooted in Greek drama, and it was to Tony Harrison's Oresteia that we turned for a foundation for the show. The story, the oldest complete surviving tragedy, we return to again and again as a dramatic refrain. It is concerned with revenge and retribution being sought for crimes committed through three successive generations in the family of Atreus. Each slaughter and letting of blood was undertaked in the name of "Justice"; the crimes of the previous generation being pointed to as justification for their own actions. The Oresteia became a symbol for all wars and bloodletting whose causes were seen to lay in the hands of dead generations.

"to witness genocide is to feel not only the chill of your own mortality, but the degradation of all humanity. I am not worried if this sounds like a sermon. I do not care if there are those who dismiss it as emotional and simplistic. It is the fruit of witness. Our trade may be full of imperfections and ambiguities, but if we ignore evil we become the authors of a guilty silence." Fergal Keane

The Oresteia: A short summary!
Having just returned from the Trojan war, King Agamemnon is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, as punishment for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphegenia. He is murdered alongside Cassandra, abducted during the sacking and destruction of Troy. Orestes and Electra avenge their father's death by killing their mother Clytemnestra. Orestes is hounded by the Furies and finally brought to justice. All of these events are forseen by Cassandra, who has the gift of prophesy, but she is cursed—no-one believes her.

"...men (and women too) are capable of committing every evil the mind can conceive. There is no natural or unwritten law that says of any atrocity whatever: this shall not be done." Otto Friedrich

CREDITS