""A bright light filled the plane,"" wrote Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets. ""We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud...boiling up, mushrooming."" For a moment, no one spoke. Then everyone was talking. ""Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!"" exclaimed the co-pilot, Robert Lewis, pounding on Tibbets's shoulder. Lewis said he could taste atomic fission; it tasted like lead. Then he turned away to write in his journal. ""My God,"" he asked himself, ""what have we done?"" (special report, ""Hiroshima: August 6, 1945"")
An intelligent and fascinating drama delineating a man’s infernal torment after having committed an act that would change the world forever: Flight lieutenant Ralph Sherman was a crew member at the American B- 29 bombers Enola gay, which August 6. 1945 dropped the atom bomb Little Boy on Hiroshima; an explosion taking over 200.000 human lives and marked the beginning of a new era: the Atomic age. The play takes place in a nerve clinic in 1962 during the Cuba crisis. Sherman has been committed because he has thrown a tomato after President Kennedy during a speech, and while the psychiatrists attempt to understand his motives we are drawn into a schizophrenic mind consumed with doubt and guilt trying to understand and justify the justification of the war. The writer criticises the leaders’ attempt to dominate the world using weapons of mass destruction in a series of well-written flashbacks and sneaky merging of the past and the presence. This is a powerful political drama presented with great success at the Jermyn Street Theatre. London 2000.
