It’s just her.
Chisato Minamimura in an austere white tulip dress, floating like a ghost in the darkness while she sign-mimes the stories of Deaf survivors of Hiroshima.
Her, acute and precise, neatly echoing the white-on-black linear animations projected on a gauze screen before her. The animations themselves are scenes from 1945 – a barber’s, swaying rice paddy fields, a plane preparing for the big drop, piles of dead bodies.
Sometimes grainy clips of the actual survivors fade in on the screen, retelling their experiences in Japanese sign language with English subtitles.
There is no music. Any sounds are part of the story’s fabric, conveyed via vibrating woojer belts worn by the audience.
Within the theatre’s intimate space – there is no raised platform – audience and performer alike are transported, as one, to the terrifying moment when the first A-bomb was dropped: terrifying only in an enlightened 21st century context, not that of surely the pilots carrying out the deed, or the deaf lives torn asunder by the blast.
There was no television or social media in 1945. Deaf people living in Hiroshima did not have access to radio, the telephone, or word-of-mouth. They did not know or understand what had happened to them, or why they were being treated like a lepers’ colony in love and in work for years afterwards.
In the absence of such knowledge, imagine how intense the trauma of seeing those dead bodies, naked and melted beyond gender, must have been. Adults and children, babies. The utter destruction of all that lay before them, killed by instantaneous, 2000-degree heat.
These stories are only now making themselves known through Scored in Silence, nearly 75 years later. I am incredulous how much power a 50-minute performance can have to educate us, yet here it is.
There can be no better storyteller than Chisato Minamimura, patching stories, nuclear science and news together in a poignant contemporary quilt of one place made infamous by political greed.
The Ovalhouse run being so short – it ran for just three performances – my hope, and belief, is that Scored in Silence secures many more bookings, not just nationwide but globally. The survivors deserve it.
Scored in Silence will be performed at Greenside, Edinburgh as part of the British Council Edinburgh Fringe Festival Showcase on 19th-23rd August 2019.
Melissa Mostyn 
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