Review of the play “Hiroshima” at the “Space “Inside”” theater

The “Space “Inside”” theater presented a play by Alexander Plotnikov based on the book by John Hersey, who followed the fate of the residents of Hiroshima who survived the atomic bombing. The performance was made jointly with the company “Daughters of Soso”. Tells Alla Shenderova.

Hersey’s book grew out of a report published in The New Yorker on August 31, 1946. In 1993, in John Hersey’s obituary, the report was called the most famous magazine article in history. The material occupied an entire issue, the circulation sold out so much that Einstein, who came to his senses late, had to make copies for his physicist friends.

Having visited Hiroshima in the spring of 1946, Hersey conducted many interviews, then selected six stories from them, trying to understand how these people survived and what happened in the first days after the destruction of the city. Soon his report was published in the form of a book, translated into all languages ​​and becoming a classic. Forty years later, Hersey completed it, adding the chapter “Hiroshima: Consequences” – in it he talked about the further fate of his heroes.

“If ever there was a subject that could exhaust a journalist and overload his writing, it is Hiroshima. …however, the words he chose were so clear, calm and restrained … that the story turned out to be truly terrible,” the New Yorker editors would write in the same obituary. A balanced narrative is perhaps the main thing that the director borrowed from the journalist, although the book is rearranged so that lines and stories overlap each other. Actually, that’s what happened: Hersey’s interlocutors told what happened to them at the same time – on the morning of August 6, 1945, before and after “this.” They all saw a silent bright flash. They did not immediately understand what “it” was.

“The sound of the murmur of the Ota River. The sound of the wind on Mount Fuji. The sound of the silence of the auditorium” – the outlines of mountains and rivers flash on the walls of the small box stage, hieroglyphs flow down like drops – they are written in a column. The ascetic beauty of Elena Perelman’s lighting design is complemented by the scenography of Konstantin Solovyov. Five actresses (you won’t notice the sixth right away) are immersed in a milky fog. The water under their feet is the same shade. Rice or cane grows in this. Geta, Japanese wooden sandals shaped like a bench, help actresses avoid getting their feet wet. However, there is little movement. The sixth one, Ulyana Lukina, who plays the young Mrs. Sasaki, got the most of them – after the explosion, she was overwhelmed with books. They didn’t help her get out right away, then they left her with the dead, then, with a complex fracture, they took her from place to place, deciding whether to cut off her leg. Lukina tells all this as she moves from behind the partition separating the playing space from the exit to the others sitting in a circle.

Six actresses: Marietta Tsigal-Polishchuk, Ira Sova, Natasha Gorbas, Yulia Skirina, Ulyana Lukina and Elena Makhova tell the stories of men and women – they talk about their characters in the third person, then immediately in the first. They speak quickly but calmly, forming an ensemble, complemented by the temporal music of Maria Anikeeva.

Alexander Plotnikov calls this style of acting “position 0.5” – when it no longer matters whether you are an actor or a character: you are someone connecting the actor with the character. They also played in his Krasnoyarsk “Anna Karenina” (see “Kommersant” dated October 10, 2021), where Tolstoy’s text seemed to be broadcast by the space itself.

Only Natasha Gorbas is allowed to “color” the text with emotions – she got the role of Mrs. Nakamura, a widow with three children, talking about the disaster in that soothing voice in which fairy tales are read to children. And it becomes a special note in the ensemble, whose tuning fork is Marietta Tsigal-Polishchuk (Jesuit priest Father Wilhelm).

They learned to complement each other so well and feel the rhythm when they became the company “Soso’s Daughters,” created by Zhenya Berkovich, a director who asks to be called a director. They say that the casting for this company was that Zhenya took everyone. And she insisted that each performance is created together – horizontally. We must admit that this works. Only great professionals can exist in Plotnikov’s “Hiroshima”.

In Hersey’s book, six survived, perhaps because they were not preoccupied with themselves – they were constantly saving others. “Wipes, wraps, ties,” Yuli Skirin repeats as a refrain about her doctor, the only doctor to survive in the clinic. Here, too, six actresses from a small troupe exist quietly and unbendingly, in spite of everything and are quite in tune with their characters.

There is, however, an important contradiction between the book and the play. Hersey’s meaning and pathos was that the nuclear tragedy should not happen again. He considered what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be the beginning of a new period in the history of mankind: “There, in a tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a man was crushed by books.” This era, according to Hersey, was to be an era without wars. Plotnikov’s performance contains the opposite and quite sensational idea: the horror of what happened in Japan has long been normalized by us. How any wars, disasters and suffering are normalized. We no longer say “this must not happen again” because we are not afraid of repeating it. We believe that “this will pass” and we will survive.

And therefore, perhaps, the most terrible thing in the play is not the descriptions of peeling skin and the transformation of living, burned bodies into dead ones (Plotnikov shortens them to avoid “pornography of ruins,” that is, speculation in horror), but the ending. When the crippled residents of a no longer existing city gather where the train station used to be and listen to a loudspeaker broadcasting the speech of the emperor, who addressed ordinary Japanese for the first time in a thousand years. This fact strikes them more than the message that Japan lost the war. They don’t think about who plunged them into this war. They are submissive and cry in awe of authority.