Nuclear family. Photo by John Haynes.

In the endnotes to Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X, there are some lightly contextless facts.  One of them culled from a 1984 issue of Science Digest reads:

Number of human deaths possible from one pound of plutonium if finely ground up and inhaled: 42,000,000,000 

1984 U.S. plutonium inventory, in pounds: 380,000

These numbers multiplied together: 16,000,000,000,000,000

Coupland’s pervasive sense of eschatology was typical of the 90s, a long drawn-out sigh of a deathwish, where the threat of nuclear catastrophe, as it merged into environmental millenarianism, became less clear and less present.  In the same era Indie pop group Barcelona sung their jaunty clamorous ditty Have You Forgotten the Bomb?: “Everyone around me looks so happy now.  Who am I to bring this party down?”  Such was the post-Cold War sentiment of moving on from the ‘nuclear age’.  For Nicolas Kent’s swansong at the Tricycle comes a two-part reminder, ten short plays comprising a blazing genealogy of the bomb from Proliferation to the Present, with a host of accompanying events.  And tonight the clarity and quality of writing from some big hitters, and some judiciously narrativised verbatim contributions from Richard Norton-Taylor, does more than enough to smooth out the shrapnel edges that in lesser-hands ambition of this magnitude would doubtless  inflict upon artistry.

Ron Hutchinson’s Calculated Risk has Clement Attlee as an old goat in a cabinet meeting of the Labour party, presaging the cumulating strain of the party’s thinking which ran through Gaitskill (here projected onto the glowering hemisphere of Polly Sullivan’s hyperreal missile launch pad) through Kinnock’s rejection of unilateral disarmament to Brown’s renewal of Trident. When Simon Rouse as the pro-bomb Ernest Bevin moves to front of stage and bear-like intones “It’s Labour Party policy”, you get a sense of the duration of establishment attachment to the weapon. And when Michael Cochrane’s finely mannered Atlee suggests the cat’s whiskers might be out of the bag, if not the whole cat, and yet there still may be a chance “to stuff it back in”, the sheer force of technological determinism-verging-on-fatalism, of enlightenment as passage a l’acte, hits home like the proverbial blast wind.

As you’d expect Scientists are present: in Zinnie Harris’ opener exilic Germans in 1940 wilt under the British establishment mores, guests of whom something is expected.  Under the gaze of a picture of Ghandi an Indian physics professor negotiates with his pupil who sees a “terrifying possibility” in science as more exciting than any other, because it demands a further solution.  Here Amit Gupta’s dense and leavened Option delivers a nuanced account of the bomb’s role in burgeoning nationalism, weaving deterrent into non-violent resistance – the idea that “what we don’t do with it will show what kind of nation we are”, and the deliciously Strangelovian concept of a P.N.E. – a peaceful nuclear explosion. Weapons inspectors in Hazmat suits close the evening in a neat structural callback from Zinnie Harris, this time desultory, men of practicalities and ordinary dreams.

That warfare has taken on a different hue since the parting of the iron curtain, the fearful symmetry of two world powers giving way to “asymmetric” and “horizontal” fighting, is made apparent in the Ukraine.  John Donnelly’s Little Russians comes off like an episode of Shameless with an arms deal in a forest in front of a lovingly detailed nuclear warhead.  The frontiersmanship of the dispersal of atomic weapons, as they become a marketable good across the globe, is delivered through clownish bumpkins.  The Ukrainian episode is typical of the evening, skirting the obvious Bay of Pigs and Bikini Atols, Greenhams and Aldermastons, seeking instead illuminating corners and conjunctures.  And when a verbatim speech by President Kravchuk informs us that Ukraine does indeed possess nuclear weapons but is confirmed as a non-nuclear state, it is just one of the contradictions that echo through this account.

Because it  is prominently put to us that the bomb is an image of paradox and contradiction.  As Colin Teevan points out in his blazingly interrogative There Was a Man. There Was No Man. the difference between the two is that while contradiction contains no truth, a paradox hints at one deeper.  So it is that Hutchinson’s Atlee can glimpses hope (“is it possible that war could become so terrible, it outlaws itself?”).  In David Grieg’s lucid and translucent Letter of Last Resort we see a Prime Minister tasked with penning Britain’s nuclear response, to be opened by a captain of a submarine in event of a “decapitating” strike. In what is tantamount to philosophically crafted and dystopian episode of Yes Prime Minister, Simon Chandler’s magnificently Socratic yet obsequious civil servant suggests that to maintain an effective deterrent “the only rational thing to do is to behave irrationally”, after laying the confusing payload on Belinda Lang’s arch PM: “To write ‘retaliate’ is monstrous and irrational. To write ‘don’t retaliate’ renders the whole nuclear project valueless.”  Such is the gaming intellectual territory that these devices play out in, their “powers are abstract and conceptual. They are truly philosophical weapons.”

“News as entertainment, entertainment as news”, rails Ryan Craig’s English analyst played by Daniel Rabin, as he attacks a CIA agent for that “soft-power” used “to anaesthetise the world”. Since he took over in 1984 Nicholas Kent has created an astonishing legacy of political drama that has worked to give depth and power to current events, a place of rigorous counter-discourse and intelligent challenge. At its most sober and winning it has provided a whisper in the ear of the political classes and erudite detective work for its diverse audiences, at its most thrilling an artistic nerve agent in the war against infotainment.  Kent decamps, and as it deals with the 40% cut in total grants handed to it by the government, the Tricycle’s future in this regard is unpredictable.  What is certain is that, if you have the slightest interest in theatre as something that exceeds entertainment, you owe it to yourself to be present at this particular ending.