Event details
Camberwell Grammarians Theatre Company presents its first production of 2024: Paper Lanterns, Paper Cranes.
This powerful drama illustrates the impact of war and the nightmare of nuclear fallout as experienced by some of World War II's most innocent victims: the children of Japan. Kyushu, a Japanese "street orphan," is admitted into a Hiroshima hospital in the mid-1950s. When it is discovered that she's losing her eyesight, the spectre is raised whether she is also a victim of "A-bomb illness."
Despite her denial that she was in Hiroshima during the bomb blast, she is visited by a ghastly memory of the burned out city, the Cockroach Woman, and she resists all attempts by a Japanese physician and an American psychologist to help her. She falls more deeply into depression and hopelessness until her chance meeting and eventual friendship with a young A-bomb patient named Sadako gives Kyushu the strength and desire to recover.
The play includes a 20 minute interval.
It contains strobe lighting, mature content and some distressing themes.