Atomic Tales is Elena Arvigo’s devastatingly poignant stage adaptation of Svetlana Alexiovich’s Chernobyl Prayer.
Alexiovich’s words are haunting and beautiful — her memoir won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and has become a famous novel on the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. It follows a woman whose husband was a firefighter at the plant, and who subsequently died of radiation poisoning.
The set is a beautiful reconstruction of a dinner table, strewn with dead flowers. Although simple, the space is immediately haunting; Arvigo begins sat on the stage, singing a haunting melody, in full PPE and a gas mask.
On stage, there are moments of true beauty. Arvigo has a tone in her voice which is haunting and harrowing. The whole piece is, appropriately, sombre and reflective; a reflection on love and unimaginable loss.
She tells the story with urgency and deep-seated emotion. The tale is relentless — it seems hard work to perform and is hard work to watch, but that is the point. Arvigo barely stops crying for the entire hour.
Equally, the piece asks questions about truth and deception. You can always trust people, Arvigo tells us; people are good. But governments are not to be trusted.
Arvigo intersperses her words with Italian — she is Italian, and normally performs Atomic Tales in Italy. Although it felt like a reminder that she could not find the words in English to express the magnitude of devastation, I found it a little distracting from the piece. I also would have liked a little more variation in the intensity, to punctuate certain moments.
At the end of the show, Arvigo plays a clip from a Sarah Kane interview, about how theatre is integral to human life. It is at this point that the show makes complete sense — we tell stories as a means to survive.
This is a heart-wrenching hour of powerful theatre.
Atomic Tales will run until August 30 at Zoo Playground. Buy tickets here.
Image provided to The Student as press material.
