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 ...