The Minamata disaster was allowed to continue, in part, because an entire community was pressured into silence. See no evil; hear no evil; speak no evil – as a mechanism of control rather than a principle of peace. The playwright returned to that idea repeatedly. It became the conceptual spine of the production.

The actors entered not as characters but as activists, dressed in black, carrying banners and bandanas printed with Japanese words, singing a fight song as they took the space. Before the story began, they asked the audience to carry these words out with them when it was over. Each time an actor stepped into a character, they shed their activist clothing and took on a single costume piece. The transition was visible and deliberate, the distance between witness and subject kept in plain sight throughout.

Shadow work carried the physical reality of the pollution: something spreading, encroaching, impossible to look away from once you'd seen it. The fight to tell this story, the production kept insisting, is not historical. It's ongoing.