The Mistake by Michael Mears – Arcola Theatre, London

The Mistake, which returns to the Arcola for a short run during a global tour, is a two-person show about something that happened 80 years ago, but still reverberates through our culture: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Michael Mears is both writer and performer, switching between multiple roles alongside Riko Nakazono. The play combines close examination of the bombing and its terrible aftermath with inventive staging that brings a topic that risk become a lecture to life with ingenuity and moments of powerful emotion.

Mears focuses key figures in the development and deployment of the first atomic bomb, who are often forgotten: atomic scientist Leo Szilard, who made the breakthrough that led to the successful testing of the first atomic reactor; and Paul Tibbets, the pilot who dropped the Hiroshima bomb, flying the Enola Gay – a plane named after his mother. Szilard was immediately aware of what he might have unleashed, and campaigned valiantly, an in vain, to prevent the bomb being dropped on a populated city. Tibbets, whose later interviews with Studs Terkel form part of the play’s source material, was unapologetic to the end about his role and said he’d do it again in a heartbeat. Mears plays both these constrasting characters and a host of others, including Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein, with great conviction.

His white, male authority figures are set against a parallel storyline about the horrific impact of the bombing itself, told through the eyes of a young Hiroshima woman played by Nakazono. Using minimal props, the pair make a big impact, staging the moment-by-moment approach of the B-29 as a normal day unfolds in the city below. The impact of the bomb is graphically evoked with nothing but a model plan and a set of metal steps, while Nakazono’s account of the terrible injuries and the mass deaths it caused is heartbreaking. Rosamunde Hutt’s direction gives the show life and energy, and Mears’ writing gives it strong purpose. It is very well-informed and researched, full of fascinating or alarming pieces of information, such as the fact that the possibility of a critical nuclear reaction came to Szilard, living in London, as he waited to cross the road on Southampton Row; or the little-know fact that the USA made preparations to bomb a third Japanese city. The Mistake – which, needless to say, refers to Szilard’s discovery of the chain reaction – is a campaigning play, seeking to prevent us forgetting what a terrible thing we once did, so we do all we can to prevent it from ever happening again.