The show is set in 2022, after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A team of Ukrainian artists who have experienced the reality of war, with the performance "Hiroshima girl is afraid of thunder", rethinks the tragedy experienced by humanity in the past and tries to understand the fragility of today's man. H. Inoue, the author of the play, did not himself witness the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he felt guilty all his life for having survived. In the play, based on which the performance "Hiroshima girl is afraid of thunder" was created, the author tried to express the pain, bitterness and helplessness of the witnesses of the tragedy.
The creative team about the performance:
For us Ukrainians, this story is neither a fantasy nor a fabrication. Every day we encounter people similar to the heroes of this play. Our cities from 2022 February 24 bombed and we hear every day about the innocent victims of war.
These war victims and their families travel every day by train or car to relatively safe cities. These are crippled children, beautiful girls with disfigured bodies and faces, young men injured while defending their country and nation. And next to them are their loved ones: they too were affected by the war, although they were not physically harmed. At funeral ceremonies, parents cry at the graves: "it shouldn't have been you, it should have been me".
We meet these people everyday... Ukrainians, like Mitsue, the protagonist of the play, feel the same sense of guilt. Guilt for being safe. We have to live with this guilt even though we have done nothing wrong. We just want to survive. People die in war not only from tanks, missiles or nuclear explosions. The hearts of survivors bleed from the pain of losing their loved ones.
H. Inoue's play also sounds like a declaration of what would happen if nuclear weapons were used again. It is a kind of manifesto declaring: never again! However, today we hear again about the danger of nuclear war, not only for Ukraine, but for all of humanity. Today we see the President of the Russian Federation threatening the world with his country's nuclear potential…
Hiroshima and Nagasaki mean to the play's author, H. Inoue, what any destroyed city in their country means to Ukrainians now. The author of the play tells about the pain of Hiroshima residents in his text. By interpreting this text on stage, we wanted to embody his insights and share the "strange guilt" that came over us with people around the world.
