Albert Einstein is not feeling too good. His house is empty, his cat missing, he can't remember where he put his violin - and he is slowly driving himself insane as he struggles to solve the unanswerable question: 'Did I do the right thing?'

When a family friend, newly released from a Chinese POW camp, comes to visit, a warm reunion soon becomes an explosive collision of opposing beliefs on the subject of evil, the winning of wars, and the construction of the world's first weapon of mass destruction - the atomic bomb.

The play is set in Einstein's Princeton study, a conflation by the author of 2 places: his university office - containing the famous blackboard - and his study at home, at 112 Mercer Street. At the beginning of the play Einstein has shut himself away from the world; I sought to enhance this feeling of isolation by creating a set which had no windows, tall oppressive shelving and walls painted a rich midnight blue. The room was designed to reflect the space as the character saw it, the oddness further underlined by the colour-coded books with no titles on the spines.

The biggest challenge to this design occurs in the final scene where the author calls for a representation of the dropping of the atom bomb. To achieve this, floodlights and a white cyclorama were positioned behind the set walls which were actually made of gauze and 'detonated' with a sound cue at the appropriate point. To prevent light bleeding through the gauze during the preceding scenes we made a black curtain which was raised by pulleys just before the effect. I was greatly attracted to the idea of designing a play where nothing happened in terms of scene-change until the last four minutes of the play.