Missives - A Staged Reading

Missives. A staged reading

With Chadd Cumberbatch and A-dZiko Simba Gegele.

Part of the 2025 Being Human Festival.

A crisis unravelling in letters. Many enquiries have tried to ‘learn lessons’ from crises provoked by natural hazards. Often, the roots of disaster lie in the mis-firing communication and stalled decision-making, hidden in plain sight in archival records.

From these records, we have woven together the bluster of official communications with our imagining ‘between the lines’. The time is 1933 (or is it 1995?), the island is Montserrat (it's definitely Montserrat), permeated by earthquakes, sulphur and tension.

Is a volcano going to erupt?

Our staged reading cracks open the closed doors to the Business of Empire — where life-and-death decisions are made for populations in absentia …sometimes democracy means ‘sit tight, we’ll tell you when we’re done’.

This event is part of Being Human Festival, the UK’s national festival of the humanities, taking place 6 - 15 November 2025. Led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, with generous support from Research England, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. For further information please see beinghumanfestival.org.

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Host or Publisher Universities of Oxford, East Anglia and the West Indies