WORMWOOD

At the time of the Chernobyl disaster I was pregnant with our son Charles, and I still remember the feeling of helplessness as we tracked the fallout, heading for Scotland. It took me some ten years to get sufficient perspective on the event to write a play about it. Performed in Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, during a fiercely hot spell of weather, the play created quite a stir - members of the audience kept fainting, partly due to the weather, but partly due to the sheer stress of the subject matter! The character of Stefan (Liam Brennan) in particular reduced most of the audience to tears, with great regularity. From audience reaction, it quickly became apparent that people had been misled about Chernobyl: it had been all too easy to blame it on soviet mismanagement. Actually, it was a safety experiment that went wrong, and in spite of the fact that I never intended this to be an anti-nuclear polemic everyone involved with the production reached the alarming conclusion that this kind of accident could, and probably would, happen somewhere else in the future. I suspect the audience thought so too. Artemis (a tour de force by actor Forbes Masson) is a mysterious character - we are never quite sure who he is, but his name itself means Wormwood. And so does "Chernobyl".

Want to read more..

Download PDF (36K)