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nightmare and lament: her nation invaded’. Of the passage Heaney remarks in his introduction, The Geat woman who cries out in dread as the flames consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late-twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo; her keen is a nightmare glimpse into the minds of people who have survived traumatic, monstrous events and who are now being exposed to a comfortless future. 74
. The desperate, yet comic tone of these pageants not only raises problems for academic critics; it also seems to work counter to a modern desire to make the plays’ violence, as director Roland Reed said of the York Slaughter of the Innocents , ‘immediately and horrifyingly relevant to our time’. 2 This awareness directed Reed’s production for the 1999 University of Toronto festival, aiming to ‘liberat[e] the biblical story from the prison of the past’ by drawing on contemporary incidents of violence in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda and Somalia