Review: A THOUSAND SONS at Etcetera Theatre 11th July and Edinburgh Fringe, August 2022

‘The play does an excellent job at awakening interest and engaging sympathy, and opening up an important area of debate’ ★★★ ½

When Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’, saw the first atomic bomb detonation in New Mexico, he quoted two passages from the Bahavagad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.” and  "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".

Jamie Sefton has made a brave, committed piece that howls about the horrors of the atomic bomb. He dramatises the Hydrogen Bomb tests on Christmas Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where the British Government conducted a series of detonation tests, and several thousand service personnel, a thousand sons, got to watch. Or in fact not watch, because they were strictly ordered to avert their eyes from the bomb-flash. Jamie switches between the story of Bertie, a soldier subjected to the tests, and a contemporary campaigner, listing effects and symptoms, describing government responses, urging action from the audience. The course of Bertie’s life, the early death of his daughter through inherited genetic problems due to radiation, his transformation from a cheery British tommy to a bitter and betrayed civilian, is emotionally telling. It off-sets the statistical information, it allows Mr. Sefton to sketch in some deft character-work, and it gives him room for a few jokes. The information he provides isn’t really a joking matter.

Jamie Sefton acknowledges that 50 minutes in a pub theatre (or an Edinburgh Fringe venue) isn’t enough to tell the story, so he urges further research, and links to the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association (BNTVA). The play does an excellent job at awakening interest and engaging sympathy, and opening up an important area of debate, after 70 years of enforced silence.

 A THOUSAND SONS

Etcetera Theatre

11 July 2022

Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Greenside in Nicolson Square on select dates from 5th-20th August

Box Office: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on#q=%22A%20Thousand%20Sons%22

@a_thousand_sons

Insta: @athousandsons_show

Reviewed by Chris Lilly