The River Ota of the title flows through Hiroshima. Visiting for the first time in the early 1990s, Mr Lepage had expected devastation; instead he found a city throbbing with life and sensuality.

There is, however, some sort of a centre to this vast expanse: a house in Hiroshima that stands where the River Ota divides into its seven streams. The play opens here in 1945, during the American ...

The River Ota flows through Hiroshima, and it is here that Lepage’s five-decade story begins. In 1945, an American soldier called Luke, who has a wife and a five-year-old little boy (Jeffrey) at home, ...