The Overwhelming

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

The West failed to intervene to stop the 1994 Rwanda massacres, but it is not stinting on using the genocide as a subject for books, films and now plays.

The coverage is a decade late, but better late than never, especially if it helps avoid similar atrocities - which, as Darfur shows, is unlikely.

The latest in the genocide genre, The Overwhelming* (at the Cottesloe Theatre in London's South Bank complex) approaches the horrific events through an American professor, his new young wife and the son who rejects her: the prof has come to Rwanda to finish a book that will save his career.

They are rapidly caught up in the storm that is breaking in Rwanda. The use of Western outsiders to frame the events works surprisingly well, apart from the professor's naivety: Americans' ignorance of world affairs is a fair target, but even taking this into account, he seems ill-prepared for Rwandan realities.

In a sense, however, the play is good enough to make detailed criticism irrelevant. It rips along at a terrific pace, which matches the ruthless speed with which the killings were carried out. It builds tension well, the personal and the political plots both work, and there are some deft touches, such as the professors brief but pertinent exchange with a Bangladeshi UN peacekeeper. Yes, there are a few clichés, and one spurious irrelevance, as the son has his first sexual experience - though his angry, uncomprehending response to the young prostitute's unsentimental concerns is spot on. But there's little point in nitpicking when a major theatre spends time and money on a play dealing with such a vital theme.

Well acted and staged, the evening contains more content than a year of conventional West End productions. Nevertheless, I am left with a nagging worry: what will audiences take from it?

Max Stafford-Clark, the director, says that educating the audience particularly those who do not know all the details of the events that took place in Rwanda is one of the intentions, though he adds that Macbeth is also a play about a genocide (Each morn new widows cry, new orphans howl...). But do you need to ask what Shakespeare's intention was?

A second aim is to give some visceral understanding of the events. In the words of journalist Fergal Keanes programme notes: A play can entertain, challenge, upset and anger an audience; at its best it can make them think deeply about the world in which they live and be prepared to challenge orthodoxies and lies.

When I put my concern about the play's impact on the audience to author J. T. Rogers, he said he had written The Overwhelming "in an attempt to answer the question, 'What would I do if placed in a situation so horrific that every option open to me was morally wrong? Faced with that, who would I be?'

"As well, I have attempted to write a play that gets into the minds of people we in the West describe as evil. To call killers, even genocidaires, evil is to release ourselves from having to try and understand their actions. From having to understand how good, decent people can chose to perpetrate acts of stupefying wickedness. These are human beings, and if they are capable of doing these things then, in the right situation, so am I. So are all of us.

"For me, the theatre is place to ask such questions and to wrestle with the answers we find."

* In the late 1800s the Belgian king Leopold 11 launched a campaign to conquer the Congo basin of Africa. Over the following decades, through conquest and then subjugation, millions of Congolese were killed. The word in the Mongo language for this onslaught was lokeli, or the overwhelming.

* The play runs at the Cottesloe Theatre and then goes on tour:
5-9 September Oxford Playhouse
12-16 September West Yorkshire Playhouse
19-23 September Nuffield Theatre, Southampton
26-30 September Liverpool Everyman
3-7 October Library Theatre, Manchester