Writer and Director: Oliver Twist
This is a tale of a boy, a traumatic story of a refugee aged just four years of age when the Rwandan genocide started. On 6 April 1994, a plane carrying Rwanda’s then-president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundi’s president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down over the boy’s home city of Kiga. This event started 100 days of the massacre of, mainly, the minority Tutsi ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa by armed Hutu militia. So how come a man called Oliver Twist from Australia has written and is telling this harrowing story?
The answer is that he is telling the lived experience. However he is Hutu, so why is he telling the story? How did he end up in a refugee camp in Malawi being threatened at gunpoint, and having to flee again? Why is he now called Oliver Twist?
This production is expertly written and Twist takes the audience through this journey with him. Sometimes the stories are poetic, sometimes they are reflective. At times they form fading memories and, at others, they are harsh with traumatic reality. These switches in mood are accentuated in the change from soft lighting to stark LED.
Adding to this sense of fear and dread that Twist has faced during his 14-year journey to become a citizen of Australia, a red dot is on his back every time he turns around as if a sniper rifle is pointed at him. Or is that just the microphone light?
During this 60-minute show Twist manages to touch on many themes in his very own style and personal way; the repeated trauma of a refugee, being refused asylum for not having enough information or a birth certificate, all the red tape, the inhumanity and misunderstanding. He discusses the overt and subtle racism that every black person living in a majority-white country faces. He also tackles bigger moral questions like were the Hutus really to blame, or was it actually the colonisers’ fault, the Belgians and the Germans?
Oddly though, at the Soho Theatre, the audience is reticent to laugh at Twist’s jokes. Perhaps out of respect for the story, but it is told with such warmth and cheeky humour that it must have been hard for him to not receive the expected laughter. What’s not to laugh at when he tells us his mum is worth a dowry of five goats and five cows? In Western parlance that’s a 10/10, and then tells us he takes after her. He carries on unfazed to give us a commanding and touching account of his life and the deserved applause won’t stop at the end.
This is simply superb storytelling. This man has a gentle voice that you will really want to hear.
Runs until 24 June 2023
