Slating Silence

by Graham Taylor

Review of Slating Silence by David Morris, published by Journeymen Theatre Press 2025. [A version of this review appeared previously in the Friend of 01 August 2025.]

Quakers around the country know David Morris as one half of the Journeymen Theatre. Since 2012, he and Lynn Morris have been performing plays at Quaker Meeting-Houses, and no one who has witnessed Lover of Souls, or Red Flag over Bermondsey, will fail to remember the power of Lynn’s Elizabeth Hooton or her heart-rending, and triumphant, portrait of Ada Salter. Though Lynn and Dave have now announced their retirement from performance on the stage, the plays are still available as texts [see the panel on the left, Journeymen Theatre: Our Legacy Project], and in some cases as videos, for a future generation to rediscover and acclaim.

Less well known is David’s poetry – rugged, punchy and dark. An expert wordsmith, his lines are as tight-packed as Latin, and his sounds as alliterative as Anglo-Saxon. Some will find him too allusive. He does not write for the uninformed, and the notes at the end of Slating Silence make reference, amongst others, to Bertolt Brecht, Bishop Bell, the Christadelphians, T.S. Eliot, Hugh MacDiarmid, John Milton, Michael Rosen, and William Shakespeare. Yet the density of his poetry is always spiced by tart humour, and by the passion of his Quaker spirituality.

David says Slating Silence is “a Quaker’s wrestle with hatred” and the opening sentence states his plangent theme:

“I was a Quaker once who

Relished the sublime simplicity

Of uninstructed faith

That there is That of God In everyone.”

But now, as he watches every day the massacre of women and children, thousand after thousand, he has felt his sublime simplicity slip away. It once was easy to believe there was that of God in everyone: “But now? Not so.” When an Israeli minister says, “Israel should find ways more painful than death for the Palestinians”, and when an Israeli MP says, “none in Gaza is innocent”, his faith falters. If there is God in them, it is not the God of love.

He knows Palestine well, he and Lynn visiting year after year. Before the raid in October 2023 (which was as understandable, he feels, as a Jewish attempt to break out of the Warsaw Ghetto) there were many similar massacres of Palestinians, though on a smaller scale. He himself had written as long ago as 2014, in a tone of exhaustion, bordering on boredom: “The harvest in Gaza again – the seed crop of child-life – all is safely gathered in plastic bags in bloody bits of children’s bodies.” What he wrote in 2014 could have been written yesterday.

But Slating Silence is chiefly “a Quaker’s wrestle with silence”. Not only has the presence of God in everyone become discredited but silence, that Quaker virtue, has become discredited too.

David is angered by the atrocities but even more so by the silence for over a year from the politicians, the mass media, the academics, and the bishops. He howls: “What’s this, a Quaker slating silence?! A Quaker hating?” In anguish he is driven to confess: “Yes, I hate their silence of nothing speak./ The silence of their nothing saids.”

The poem returns in the end to ‘something of God’, where it started. His Quakerism has been tested to breaking point – how can he believe there is something of God in everyone in the face of that 18-month silence by the powers-that-be?

He concludes he is “Quaker still” but fears, “the That of God in Everyone now but a postulate”. He is in despair: We live now in “a night of reason… The best that we can do is stay awake/ And learn to live with hate.” I disagree. All violence and evil have consequences and will rebound on the perpetrators in the future. Already there is the success of Zohran Mamdani, elected Mayor in New York. The old tactic of equating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism was deployed against him in America, as previously against Corbyn in Britain, but this time it did not work. Those children without arms and legs will grow up. And history will deliver its verdict in their favour.

[Note by David and Lynn Morris: If people would like a copy of Dave’s poetry book, they should contact us directly by email: lynnmorris32@yahoo.co.uk. We will send copies out postage and packing free. There is no charge for the book, but we would like recipients to donate £5 either to Medical Aid for Palestinians or to Oxfam’s Gaza Appeal. See their websites. ]