Oppenheimer the Noh play: Tokyo performances commemorate Hiroshima & Nagasaki

The Noh mask of Oppenheimer, as it appears on the promotional poster for the Tokyo plays.

Worldwide commemorations will mark this year’s 80th anniversary of the August 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In Japan, commemorations will include two performances of my Noh play, Oppenheimer, to take place in the recently refurbished Kita Noh Theatre in Tokyo. According to Genichi Shimizu, the Director of the Kita School of Noh:

it will be highly significant for the Kita Noh Theatre to sponsor these performances on the 80th anniversary of the end of the war through performances timed to coincide with August 6th and 9th, the dates of the atomic bombings.

For this production, the Kita School of Noh will collaborate with Theatre Nohgaku, a Japanese-American company dedicated to the creation and performance of new Noh plays in English (Emmert and Thorpe 2025), and with the Yanai Initiative for Globalising Japanese Humanities.  Theatre Nohgaku will mount the performance, while the Yanai Initiative, which was established in 2013 as the brainchild of Dr Michael Emmerich and Mr Yanai Tadashi, the founder of the Japanese global apparel retailer Uniqlo, provides essential logistic and financial support for the production.

Noh: an ancient art transcending time

Japanese Noh theatre is an ancient art, and yet it has a universality that transcends time and place.  In 2001 Noh became the first item to be inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Developed in the fourteenth century, Noh is performed on a bare stage, by performers wearing lavish costumes and exquisite masks, and a small ensemble of instrumentalists. The bareness and economy of its formal elements— the performance space, its highly constrained textual and musical forms, and its highly stylised movement and dance—allow Noh to not only present ancient stories in a way that has remained relevant to audiences down the ages, but also to accommodate new stories. Over the past century and a half, the Kita School has actively fostered the creation and performance of new Noh plays.

As is often the case in Noh, the protagonist in Oppenheimer is a ghost, in this case the ghost of Robert Oppenheimer. In Japanese culture, ghosts are seen as beings who, as the result of unresolved issues that they have carried into the afterlife, are trapped in endless and painful cycles of birth and death. Here the unresolved issue, and the source of the ghost’s torment, is his unacknowledged remorse at the suffering caused by the weapon that Oppenheimer and his team at Los Alamos created. He is condemned to return every year, on the anniversary of the bombings, to the fires of Hiroshima. Liberation from this endless cycle comes only when he finally accepts responsibility for his actions and elects to enter the fires of hell for all eternity, and to suffer on his own body the pain that he inflicted on others. Mr Shimizu draws broader implications from this.

John Oglevee performs as Oppenheimer (Act 1). From the 2015 performance of Oppenheimer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

While, in this work, Oppenheimer escapes from the cycle of reincarnation by taking on endless suffering, this resolve should not only be confined to Oppenheimer, but also shared by the Japanese people, who became a nation that was bombed as a result of rushing into war, and by extension, by all people living in an era that opened the door to the nuclear age as a result of the development of the atomic bomb.

John Oglevee, an American actor and founding member of Theatre Nohgaku, will perform the main role of Oppenheimer in the Tokyo performances, as he did in 2015 when the Oppenheimer was first performed at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Like Mr Shimizu, he understands the theme of suffering and its resolution that lies, as is many other Noh plays, at the heart of Oppenheimer.

I see the presentation of this piece as an offering to share pain in order to facilitate healing. When donning a mask in Noh, one loses oneself, not in the portrayal of a character, but in the striving to connect with the very roots of humanity. I’m honoured to be allowed this opportunity.

Fudo hands Oppenheimer his sword and snare, from the 2015 performance of Oppenheimer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Professor Michael Emmerich, who currently leads the Yanai Initiative, also identifies Noh in general, and Oppenheimer in particular, as a powerful vehicle for reflection.

I hope these two performances of Oppenheimer will leave those lucky enough to experience them with a renewed sense that, even now, Noh matters; that, indeed, it remains as powerfully essential now, as a vehicle for reflection simultaneously personal, societal, and historical, as it has ever been.

In the last act of the play, after his final descent into the fire-hell of Hiroshima, Oppenheimer meets Fudō Myō-ō, a Wisdom King in the Buddhist pantheon, who dwells unmoving within fire and uses his sword and a snare to liberate people from delusion. Impressed by the sacrifice of Oppenheimer’s ghost, Fudō hands him his weapons and exhorts him to use them—and to dance— for the liberation of all beings.

This is the ‘sharing pain in order to facilitate healing’ that John Oglevee identified as lying at the heart of Oppenheimer.

Remembering the disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

As I write, Israel is attacking nuclear facilities in Iran. What can be more relevant than the nuclear issues that Robert Oppenheimer has condemned us all to wrestle with, for as long as humanity survives? While Oppenheimer addresses the pain of those who suffered from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it also highlights the ongoing struggle to contain and reinterpret Oppenheimer’s legacy.

As Richard Emmert, who composed the music for Oppenheimer said, “It is my hope that Allan Marett’s Noh, Oppenheimer, will be a further step in the remembrance of that tragedy so such a tragedy never occurs again.”

Speaking personality, my hope is that Oppenheimer can show us how, by engaging with suffering—both our own and others—we too can transform the disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into a narrative of hope and liberating action, and that this will carry us all safely into the future.

Reference

Emmert, Richard and Ashley Thorpe (eds). Intercultural Japanese Noh Theatre: Texts and Analyses of English-language Noh. Bloomsbury: London, 2025.

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