As the Labourers carry on their duties pouring cement, the Voice of the Silo delivers the only known extant ancient Greek fragment phrase from Phrynichos' play Alcestis referring to Herakles's epic struggle as he is wearing down the body of Death by wrestling with him:[8][9][10] σῶμα δ᾽ἀθαμβὲς γυιοδόνητον τείρει ("he wears down his fearless, limb-twisted body"[11]) at which time a statue of Herakles starts rising from the construction site.
[8] In the play, Harrison stars as the spirit of Phrynichos, a dramatist who was persecuted during his time because he took a stance against those who tried to appease the invading Persian army.
Harrison, however, casts doubt, during the performance of his play, on the ability of his art to illuminate the plight of the victims at Krajina or Srebrenica or to receive a responsive audience,[3] a fact that he seems to emphasise in a self-deprecating way when at the end of Harrison's speech, as the Spirit of Phrynicos exits the stage, one of the Labourers loudly exclaims: "Who the fuck was that?".
[6] In a scene of the play Hercules, while lying on his own funeral pyre, delivers a speech about the power of fire in a manner reminiscent of Harrison's treatment of the same theme during his 1998 film Prometheus.
[13] In the play Harrison presents Herakles' "furor" as "racist rage" and the murder of his own children as "part and parcel of genocide" and ethnic cleansing.
Labourers 2 and 3 in unison then describe the shirt as having been made by the victims of the atrocities of the Bosnian War describing the victims of the ethnic cleansing:[8] Muslims that are mouldering in mass-execution trenches…The fingers of the raped girl who wove herself a noose…Sarajevo children his shells made amputees…The mother of the mortared mosque's dismembered muezzin, assisted by the convoys of the cleansed of Knin.Kathleen Riley writes that while at the Drama Festival the other works presented there were high-budget productions performed at the huge ancient stadium close to the Delphi sanctuary, Harrison's play was noticed because of its "modest scale, muscular language and rhythmic thrust" which made it a more "immediate" for the audience.
Lorna Hardwick mentions that in his play Harrison speaks about the power of art in "redeeming destruction":[14] … Phrynichos, who gave the theatre a start in redeeming destruction through the power of art,and, witnessing male warfare, gave the taskof mourning and redemption to the female mask