Oppenheimer
Image: Photo: Kazuhiro Inue
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer is intended as a piece that will heal wounds from this most dreadful time.
“It’s a really dramatic piece about a really contemporary issue. The costumes, the dance and the music are spectacular,” explained the playwright, Professor Allen Marett. “The masks are absolutely gorgeous. It’s structured like a traditional Noh play. The only thing that isn’t Noh is that it’s a modern story and it’s in English. It is a story about the ghost of American scientist Robert J Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atomic bomb’.”
In traditional Noh plays the main character is often a ghost. In Japanese culture, a ghost means someone who is not able to depart from the world because they still have some ties to it – those ties can be love, sometimes because they were involved in terrible actions, war or any unresolved attachment to the world. It results in becoming a ghost and hanging around, and that’s regarded as a pretty miserable existence. Through a process of interacting with another character, the ghost finds a way to resolve those issues.
“Noh is a genre of theatre, it’s a tradition that comes from the 13th Century. It’s a form of medieval Japanese music, regarded as one of the great world theatre forms, originally associated with the Samari class and is strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism,” Marett added. (MS)
Sept 30 & Oct 1, 6pm. Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Conservatory Road. $45-$65. Tickets & info: music.sydney.edu.au
BY MEL SOMERVILLE
