The Tricycle goes nuclear with a season of two blasts of short plays: THE BOMB - a partial history.
The First Blast: Proliferation - five short plays (1940 - 1992)
FROM ELSEWHERE: THE MESSAGE…
by Zinnie Harris
In a lab in Birmingham two physicists uncover something. If their calculation is right, it will change the course of the war, if anyone will listen.
CALCULATED RISK
by Ron Hutchinson
This is the world that was made by the bomb that was dropped by the plane that we built on one day in August in 1945. After a landslide victory in the General Election of 1945, Clement Attlee finds himself in power, and within days the A-Bomb has been dropped on Japan. The war is over, but the Iron Curtain has descended from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. The victorious powers have to decide how to handle a nuclear world – should Britain go it alone or shelter behind America’s skirts? SEVEN JOYS
by Lee Blessing
A gentleman’s club opens in 40s Washington with only one member, but as the years roll by membership suddenly doubles,then 2 becomes 4 and 4 becomes 8, and so on. What are the rules? And how on earth can they stop the membership proliferating? These are the worrying questions facing the founder members. OPTION
by Amit Gupta
In 1964 the People’s Republic of China carried out its first nuclear weapons-test. What followed in India was an intense period of soul searching. How should a nation founded on Gandhi’s principles of non-violence react? In 1968 under increasingly intense pressure from the US and the Soviet Union to sign their jointly initiated Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, India finds herself at a crossroads. For three leading civil nuclear scientists the politicians’ decision of which path to pursue will mark a turning point in all of their lives.
LITTLE RUSSIANS
by John Donnelly
The Soviet Union’s sudden collapse into chaos leaves the Ukraine and Kazakhstan with their fingers still on the nuclear button. The Russians and the Americans form an uneasy alliance to try to locate the missing missiles. However, deep in the countryside, a Ukrainian family have other ideas, and seize their chance of making quick money on the black market. In an anarchic look at power and politics, the ambitions of two super-powers are tested by a wheeler-dealing pair of scrap metal merchants.
The Second Blast: Present Dangers - five short plays (1992 - 2012)
THERE WAS A MAN. THERE WAS NO MAN.
by Colin Teevan
While Israel officially has no nuclear arms programme, few doubt it has; Iran claims this gives it the right to develop its own nuclear programme. Who will be the first to blink? When an Israeli and Iranian scientist meet at a conference in Jordan, their meeting has deep repercussions for their nations, their families and themselves. AXIS
by Diana Son
North Korea has always used their nuclear programme as a bargaining chip for aid. But when they suddenly find themselves branded as part of an Axis of Evil by the U.S, they prepare themselves for war. TALK TALK FIGHT FIGHT
by Ryan Craig
In a room in the United Nations in New York the European delegation prepare for their next session on Nuclear Non-Proliferation with Iran. Suddenly a CIA agent is at the door with an Iranian nuclear scientist, and a new negotiation strategy emerges. Is this breakthrough to be trusted? THE LETTER OF LAST RESORT
by David Greig
Britain has been devastated by a Nuclear strike and the Commander of a Trident submarine has to open his instructions: the letter of last resort. In Whitehall a woman struggles to write such a letter to an unimaginable future where the only safe place on the planet is under the sea in a submarine.
FROM ELSEWHERE: ON THE WATCH…
by Zinnie Harris
Two weapons inspectors are outside the gates of a Nuclear plant in Iran. They have just completed an IAEA routine inspection of the site, but they are troubled by possible deception and the enormity of their responsibility.
February - April 2012 image courtesy of Dogwoof and the Tricycle Theatre website
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