New Play Depicting Nagasaki Atomic Bombing Staged in London

Jiji Press

11:34 JST, November 3, 2024

London (Jiji Press)—”Love in Action,” a new play by Japanese playwright Hideki Noda depicting the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of the southwestern Japan city of Nagasaki, was staged in London, with the first show performed on Thursday.

Inspired by “The Brothers Karamazov” by 19th century Russian literary giant Fyodor Dostoevsky, the play, set in in Nagasaki in August 1945, questions the weight of guilt of killing people. Though it starts as a courtroom drama with a comic touch, the story gradually becomes more somber and reaches the moment of the atomic bombing, one of the worst tragedies in the history of mankind, in the end.

“I thought that the atomic bombing has to be portrayed in a direct way in order to reach (the audience),” Noda, 68, who wrote and staged the play, said.. A native of Nagasaki, he had depicted the atomic bombing of his hometown figuratively in his previous works. This was the first time that he explicitly portrayed the event in his play.

Seventy-nine years have passed since the end of World War II and memories of the war continue to fade. “The fact of atomic bombings may have become just a single line on the page of history,” Noda said.

He also pointed out that in Japan too, the view may prevail that atomic bombings were inevitable to end the war and reduce the number of victims. “What has happened is nothing but an impossible massacre,” he emphasized.

In October, the Japan Confederation of A- and H- Bomb Sufferers Organizations, or Nihon Hidankyo, which has called for the abolition of nuclear weapons, was named as the recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. While welcoming the feat, Noda lamented that even such great news quickly gets buried in the flood of information. He said, for him, the phrase “the only country to have suffered atomic bombings” sounds like a season’s greeting. “I want people to chew on the phrase once again,” Noda added.

After the Japan tour, Japanese actors Jun Matsumoto, Masami Nagasawa and Eita Nagayama burned up the stage also in London. Following the opening night performance in a theater packed with some 1,500 spectators, the cast received a standing ovation and thunderous applause.

A 44-year-old woman from Colchester in southeastern Britain who has visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in the other atomic-bombed Japanese city of Hiroshima said that the scene in the play of the atomic bomb being dropped was striking. She said that she felt the immense damage of the bombing in a different way from the museum and that she found it heartbreaking.