Nuclear weapons could destroy us all, right now – so, in the year that marks the 80th anniversary of the first use of atomic bombs in war, on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6 and 9 August 1945 – why aren't we talking about them?

From the team that created the award-winning Status and Confirmation, comes Talking About the Fire, a show about a new nuclear weapons treaty – one that’s trying to give the power to eliminate nuclear weapons to the states, and people, who don’t possess them.

Created by seven-time Fringe First winner Chris Thorpe and Claire O’Reilly (Abbey Theatre) and developed with Tony Award-winning Rachel Chavkin, it ends its UK tour at Lighthouse Poole on Thursday 22 May.

Sometimes the threat slides into view – Russia invades Ukraine – but that doesn’t make nuclear weapons more dangerous. They’re always dangerous. And one day, deliberately or accidentally, they’ll be used again.

Chris Thorpe invites audiences to engage in a direct conversation with him about the state of nuclear threat in the world today and how we can work together to regain agency on the urgent issue of nuclear proliferation.

Talking About the Fire is a one-person show inspired by the sister theatre show A Family Business, which draws on several years’ research with senior arms-control advisors, UN diplomats and activists working to develop the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), as well as officials representing nuclear weapons states. Both shows examine the TPNW, and tell the story of its groundbreaking attempt to shift the power centres of diplomacy around one of the most urgent threats to human civilisation, by putting decision-making into the hands of a coalition of Non-Government Organisations (NGOs), civil society pressure groups, and crucially, countries, mostly representing the Global South, who are normally sidelined or ignored in the ‘normal’ power-structures of international policy making.

As well as scenes based on deep research, and information about nuclear threat, Talking About The Fire contains a huge element of conversation with the audience – it is about bringing what is usually regarded as a remote world, inaccessible and dominated by experts, alive in the theatre, and giving the audience pathways to regaining their agency on the urgent issue of nuclear proliferation.

Chris Thorpe said: “Talking About the Fire explores a very important but strangely absent conversation that we need to have about nuclear weapons as one of the most urgent and underexplored ongoing threats to global society and encourages us to think about how this intersects with other issues and experiences of justice, economics and social structures in our daily lives.

“There is a general sense that people lack agency in global affairs and this show is an important conversation about giving that agency back to those people. The show does this by taking the issue out of the province of experts – and the impossibly far away rooms where it can feel they exist in – by bringing the conversation to audiences wherever they are.

“Therefore, the show is guided by and relies on the expertise that the audience brings to that room and so must be a different show every time it is performed. By empowering audiences to actively participate in a genuine conversation about that specific group of people in that specific room, it reminds audiences that they are experts in where they live and what life is like where they live, and that gives them a way to engage with these global topics.”

Chris is an award-winning writer and performer whose current work includes A Family Business and Talking About The Fire, and Always Maybe The Last Time, about the psychology of the climate crisis, for the Royal Court.

What they say:

“If you don't know the work of Manchester-based playwright Chris Thorpe, you should, because he is one of the UK's most thoughtful theatre-makers, tackling subjects and issues that others shy away from.” - Lyn Gardner (Stagedoor)

“Talking About The Fire is one of the most significant contributions to advancing the discussion on nuclear weapons related risks and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons since the Treaty itself was negotiated and adopted in 2017.” - Grethe Lauglo Østern (Norwegian People’s Aid)

★★★★ “Informative and deeply affecting… Thorpe is an assured and tremendously engaging performer.” – The Stage

★★★★★ ‘It’s all masterfully put together… this show culminates in an encounter that really puts the ‘alive’ into ‘live theatre’. – Time Out

China Plate and Staatstheater Mainz presents TALKING ABOUT THE FIRE

THURSDAY 22 MAY 8pm (SHERLING STUDIO)
Age guidance: 14+ 

Tickets and information 01202 280000 

www.lighthousepoole.co.uk