There he produced plays in the round including Philoctetes and Pinocchio, which he wrote with Warren Jenkins and an abbreviated version of The Man Born to be King by Dorothy L. Sayers.
According to various mythographical accounts, not always uniform and coherent, of Strabo, Pseudo-Apollodorus, Lycophron and Pseudo-Aristotle, the Greek hero Philoctetes reached these places on his way back from the Trojan War, together with the Rhodians under Tlepolemus.
At the time of its composition, Heaney saw themes of the Philoctetes as consonant with the contemporary political situation in South Africa, as the apartheid regime fell and Nelson Mandela was released from prison without a full-scale war.