Hiroshima, My Love

Marguerite Duras CREATIVE TEAM Based on the screenplay of the same name by Marguerite Duras, for Alain Resnais's cult film Translated from French by: Lucija Klarić Adaptation: Lucija Klarić and Rajna Racz Director: Rajna Racz Dramaturgy: Lucija Klarić Music and sound design: Marin Živković Set design: Ana Paulić Costume design: Mirna Mihoković Lighting design: Elvis Butković Stage movement: Ena Jagec Musicians: Letizia Roce, Branko Sterpin, Matej Milošev, Filip Merčep and Marin Živković CAST Her: Judita Franković Brdar Him: Marko Kasalo CO-PRODUCTION Istrian National Theatre Pula City Theatre, Kristalna kocka vedrine House – Sisak City Theatre and Kuća Nahero Art Organisation DESCRIPTION Hiroshima, My Love, based on Marguerite Duras's screenplay for Alain Resnais's cult film, is a poetic play about love, memory and the impossibility of putting into words what exceeds human experience. In a hotel room in Hiroshima, twelve years after the atomic bomb, a Frenchwoman and a Japanese man meet. Their brief love affair becomes a space in which suppressed memories, personal trauma and collective history unfold. What begins as an intimate encounter between two strangers gradually grows into a confrontation with a past that cannot be left behind. As their voices intertwine, the boundaries blur between present and past, between a love story and a historical catastrophe, between what we remember and what we try to forget. Marguerite Duras abandons any attempt to depict Hiroshima through documentary reconstruction or representation of catastrophe. Instead, she inscribes the catastrophe into the intimate space of two people meeting, into a love affair, into a body that carries the traces of the past. For Duras, it is not possible to speak of Hiroshima directly — it is only possible to speak of the impossibility of speaking about it. It is precisely in that crack between language and silence that her unique poetic text emerges, one in which love does not undo the destruction but makes it visible. Following Marguerite Duras, Rajna Racz builds a poetic theatre in which the body becomes the site where memory and forgetting are inscribed at once. The body remembers what words cannot say, yet it also tries to survive by forgetting. The play explores how historical trauma comes to inhabit the body, and how love, touch and closeness can become the last space of resistance to destruction. Nearly seventy years after the film was made, Hiroshima, My Love resonates more powerfully than ever. In a world marked by new wars and a growing nuclear threat, Hiroshima is no longer merely a historical event but an enduring possibility of the future. The play therefore does not attempt to reconstruct the past, but instead uses an intimate love story to ask how to live with the unimaginable and, in spite of everything, to keep loving.