It’s now the sixth of August 1945.
She is alone.
god, my head.
At 8.15 in the morning, everything is quiet.
The house is still.
Thirty one thousand and sixty feet above her, there is a single aircraft.
In forty three seconds, the bomb it has released will have fallen around twenty nine thousand feet and will detonate above the city.
In forty four seconds, seventy thousand people will be dead.
and the world turns.
Sand is a fractured, multi-narrative, polyvocal piece about the development and deployment of nuclear weapons; the constantly-shifting text moves between numerous times and locations, both real and hypothetical, until every thread, and the text’s language itself, collapses.
A version of the play was shown at the Royal Court Theatre on 17 June 2013, directed by Vicky Featherstone and performed by Eileen Walsh & Toby Jones.
His text is a bleak analysis of nuclear war and violence. It is underpinned by a strong feminism as the ideas are filtered through predominately female voices or ‘characters’. The form is fragmented, like the pieces of a shattered poem re-arranged to make a new pattern. The writing shifts effortlessly between poem, prose and then a deconstructed prose where the language breaks down altogether into a lyrical stream of consciousness.
Katie Mitchell
Script unpublished; please email my agent if you’d like to read it.