Natalia, a radioecologist, has slipped away from a group of scientists visiting the ghost town of Pripyat. She needs some time to herself because this town was her home in happier days, and vivid personal memories come back to her. Guided by Artemis, an unexplained, questioning presence, Natalia's consciousness switches back and forth between the present and the past.

Natalia and her fiancé Viktor are looking forward to moving into their own flat soon. At the moment, Natalia is living at her sister's and enjoys being with Tanya, her husband Stefan and their football-crazy son Anton. Stefan is a fireman and has had to put out a fire at the power station before, but it was only in a paint store. Viktor is an engineer at Chernobyl and feels constantly needled by Stefan who is cynical about safety at the plant. Viktor assures him that safety comes first - if it didn't he would give up his job.
In fact, they are about to run a safety test which will require carrying out a controlled shut-down of the reactor to check that the independent power supply to the cooling system is working.

Torn between happy memories an an acute sense of loss, Natalia slowly probes into the causes of what happened on April 25th and 26th, and in the months after the disaster.
That fateful night, while Stefan is at the plant with the rest of the fire brigade, trying to battle the flames and restrict the damage, his wife Tanya and many others watch the spectacularly beautiful fire.
Like most of them, she has to pay the price: evacuation, deteriorated health and the loss of almost everyone and everything that was at the centre of her life.

Catherine Czerkawska’s play is very well researched. The Scottish author studied everything that was available about the details of the Chernobyl accident. First performed by the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh in 1997, “Wormwood” received great praise from audience and critics alike, and has been on the Scottish National Curriculum for some time now. We put “Wormwood” on our list of plays to perform several years ago, long before the Fukushima meltdown. In bringing it to life on the stage we are mainly concerned with the human dimensions of the disaster.

     Die Strahlenökologin Natalia hat sich während des Besuchs einer Gruppe Wissenschaftler in der Geisterstadt Pripyat von den anderen entfernt, um allein den Erinnerungen an ihre frühere Heimat nachzuhängen. Begleitet von Artemis, einer unerklärten, beharrlich fragenden Präsenz, durchlebt Natalia ihre Erinnerungen, die sich mit Momenten der Gegenwart abwechseln.