Local Quaker Meetings in Hertford and Hitchin Area

About Quakers in Britain and around the World

Quaker faith springs from the experience that each one of us can have a direct relationship with the Divine. Quakers find that by meeting together for communal worship we are empowered to find peace and strength for work in the world.

Quakers are members of the Religious Society of Friends and hence they often refer to each other as 'Friends'. More than twenty seven thousand people attend Quaker meetings for worship in the UK. These quiet times of seeking the presence of God are held regularly in about 500 places, many of them Friends' Meeting Houses.

Feeding the Darkness Poster


‘Art Thou in Darkness? Mind it not for if thou dost, it will fill thee more…...’
James Naylor (17th century Quaker)

This 65 minute performance is a result of extensive research into the dark world of state-sanctioned torture and its stark impact on victims, perpetrators, families and those who collude in the ‘process’.

Immersive in style, Feeding the Darkness frames verbatim and ‘faction’ monologues, duologues and poetry as a series of ‘ministries’ which challenge our ignorance and avoidance of this sensitive and disturbing subject.

It features such wide-ranging material as the experiences of the mother of Private Lynddie England (court-marshalled for her role in the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees), that of a Kurdish asylum seeker at an appeal tribunal, and the role of trained medical professionals in state-sanctioned torture, amongst many others.

Feeding the Darkness both iterates the Quaker position on torture and encourages us to examine how the UN Convention Against Torture (1965) Article 1 is clearly being abused by UK and world-wide governments.

This production has been commissioned by Q-CAT (Quaker Concern for the Abolition of Torture).