Two genocides meet on stage

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Peter Weiss verbatim theatre piece, The Investigation, caused controversy when he wrote it from evidence by prisoners and guards given at a Nazi war crimes hearing in the German city of Frankfurt in 1963. Critics said it dishonoured and distorted the Holocaust: it didnt even mention the Jews.

Today its seen as a classic, and still carries a punch, even though most of us are have read books and articles and seen films and photographs of the genocide. The starkness of the words and presentation still has the power to shock thank goodness, because the day they dont means our humanity is dead.

The current version of the play at the Young Vic in London carries a double impact, because it is performed by a cast of Rwandan and Congolese actors, some of whose experiences are living proof that the post-Second World War cry of Never Again has been betrayed.

Many of director Dorcy Rugambas family were killed in the Rwandan genocide. He was lucky to escape. In Europe, he co-authored a six-hour work on the terrible events of 1994: after award-winning productions in Belgium and France he took the production to Rwanda where members of the audience sometimes fainted.

It is the Rwandan element that gives Young Vic production an edge. The work still stands on its own merits as a potent theatrical event, and is beautifully performed, but knowing that the actors have a relationship with an organised attempt to kill all Tutsis and moderate Hutus is the factor that probably will draw in British audiences. And why not?

Because of this bridge between the two genocides I wish the theatre, or Urwintore (the group founded by Rugamba in Kigali in 2001) or some outside organisation, had provided a little more background in the programme or in separate leaflets about the Rwandan genocide, or about genocide in general.

Few people in this country know much about what happened, and it is a pity to miss any opportunity to spread information on this vital subject. It would also reinforce the message that Urwintores production underlines: that the Nazi concentration camps, or the Rwandan massacres, were not inexplicable phenomena at which we can only gawp and condemn; that, in the words of a survivor quoted in the play, The society that produced the camps is our society.