Gauge theories are fundamental to our understanding of interactions between the elementary constituents of matter as mediated by gauge bosons(1,2). However, computing the real-time dynamics in gauge theories is a notorious challenge for classical computational methods. This has recently stimulated theoretical effort, using Feynman's idea of a quantum simulator(3,4), to devise schemes for simulating such theories on engineered quantum-mechanical devices, with the difficulty that gauge invariance and the associated local conservation laws (Gauss laws) need to be implemented(5-7). Here we report the experimental demonstration of a digital quantum simulation of a lattice gauge theory, by realizing (1 + 1)-dimensional quantum electrodynamics (the Schwinger model(8,9)) on a few-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer. We are interested in the real-time evolution of the Schwinger mechanism(10,11), describing the instability of the bare vacuum due to quantum fluctuations, which manifests itself in the spontaneous creation of electron-positron pairs. To make efficient use of our quantum resources, we map the original problem to a spin model by eliminating the gauge fields(12) in favour of exotic long-range interactions, which can be directly and efficiently implemented on an ion trap architecture(13). We explore the Schwinger mechanism of particle-antiparticle generation by monitoring the mass production and the vacuum persistence amplitude. Moreover, we track the real-time evolution of entanglement in the system, which illustrates how particle creation and entanglement generation are directly related. Our work represents a first step towards quantum simulation of high-energy theories using atomic physics experiments-the long-term intention is to extend this approach to real-time quantum simulations of non-Abelian lattice gauge theories.