"When we opened it, it was deep in the middle of the pandemic," says Murphy. "During lockdown, in an isolated area of West Cork [in Ireland], I started working in my living room, and that became the beginning of how the piece is staged and what the ideas around it are. Isolation, powerlessness, co-existence with someone else—they were all relevant at the time. It talks about all these things but transforms them into the wildest fantasy I could think of."

Post-pandemic, the staging has been very different. "What's been really satisfying is it hasn't fundamentally changed how we perform it. The themes are still relevant; it's looking at what you hold onto in a powerless situation."

It's divided into four 45-minute episodes, presented over a single night. As befits a work that not so much straddles genres as throws a whole variety of them into a blender, the audience is typically diverse, says Murphy. "Across a run of more than two or three shows, we get a huge amount of repeat audience members. Someone comes along and says: 'My friends who like films and would never normally come to the theatre—they have to see this'."

"One of the places it came from is: what does it mean to make a dance theatre TV show? In TV, the expectation is there's going to be something to reinforce the audience's interest every minute. It allowed me to take everything I know about how I make art and scrap it—it was liberating."

Volcano's rather oblique title, he adds, is a product of how and when it was written. "It's like an untenable situation that's about to change. I thought the atmosphere was like a Coke can that's been shaken too much. I think when I was making it, I felt like a volcano."