So, it’s been an eventful few days – but all in a good way.  Well, apart from the ‘stuck up a cul-de-sac for half an hour in a huge taxi’ incident.  (Did that not make the World Service news?) 

On Sunday afternoon we had our second performance of The Mistake for a much quieter and more solemn audience than the previous day.

This was followed by our first Japanese Q and A with the help of an interpreter. Some really interesting and absorbing questions, one person wondering why we hadn’t given Shigeko, the 1945 atomic-bomb survivor, a Hiroshima accent?  Good point!  In fact, the highly skilled translator of our bilingual script, Yojiro Ichikawa, had asked me initially, ‘Shall I use Hiroshima dialect for Shigeko?’ and I’d said, no – thinking that that might be one extra challenge too many for Riko to take on.  But the audience member now went on to say, that having Shigeko played in Japanese without a dialect made her somehow more universal, someone we could all identify with. Interesting.  

As in many other Q and A’s, I am asked what gave me the idea for the play – and so I recount my story of reading two interviews in the Guardian newspaper twenty three years ago (the yellowing copy of which I still have and show to the audience), an interview with the pilot and an interview with a survivor – and how I began to wonder whether that might work dramatically…if the descendant of a survivor sought out the pilot in his old age to ask him some tough questions… and thus the seeds of The Mistake were sown.