Writer, Director: Milo Rau
It’s becoming difficult to consume any political discourse today without hearing polarising discussion and divisive accusations from all sides of “hate speech.” Hateful speech is a scourge of public discussion and all too frequent. Although sometimes it is applied too loosely to anything a speaker disagrees with, devaluing it as a description of truly harmful wording.
Milo Rao’s 2011 play shows us starkly what hate speech really is. We see representations of words and discussions on the radio that directly led to the deaths of many. It’s a jarring work of theatre, highly effective and sobering.
The play is split between live performance and pre-recorded pieces to camera. Told through French and Kinyarwanda with English subtitles, it begins with a clip of one of the characters on trial after the Rwandan Genocide, then we hear from some of the survivors (actors conveying their stories on the screens). These stories of extreme violence and harm underlay the focus of the piece – an hour long broadcast from a radio station which is performed live in a glass fronted studio, designed by Anton Lukas, in front of the audience. We listen on little FM receivers and headphones, a smart touch that brings an element of exclusion of the outside world.
The station, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), is seen as having directly contributed to the murder of approximately a million people over 100 days in 1994. The play shows three of the station’s most notorious hosts performing an evening show on a day in April 1994 near the start of this horror. We see Diogene Ntarindwa as Kantano Habimana, considered the most popular host of the station; Olga Mouak as Valérie Bemeriki, one of the few female presenters; and Sébastien Foucault as Georges Ruggiu, a white man and Belgian/Italian French speaker who, though only interested in Rwandan politics for around two years before the Genocide, was eventually convicted of Incitement to Genocide after the violence.
There’s no great dramatic arc, no linear narrative here. It’s just their nightly show. They take calls, play music, read the news and chat among themselves. The structural normalcy is offset by the disturbing content that makes up their programme. We hear frequent and pressing exhortations to eradicate the “inyenzi” (cockroaches, their word for the target groups of the Tutsi ethnic group and the less radical Hutus), to rape and mutilate them. We hear gleeful roll calls of dead soldiers, outright lies designed to create division and violence, and calls from children that give away the positions of potential victims.
It’s upsetting, and scary, on two distinct levels. The first is the emotional hit caused by such a vivid portrayal of the boring machinery of state-endorsed violence at work. In this studio we’re watching four people sit around, dance and laugh, shout into microphones. Thanks to the pre-taped segments that come before we know fully the meaning of their activities – their words encourage, and will lead to, death, extreme violence and atrocity outside their stuffy room.
The second is how terrifyingly familiar all this is now. Broadcast media like radio and television were still highly dominant in 2011 when this was written, though were still somewhat separate. With the rise in online video and streaming, the performance now seems exactly like the experience (in visuals as well as actual content) one has when watching some online chat streams or podcast recordings broadcast simultaneously in video. Rau has written a radio show that’s a masterclass in the tactics and tools of propaganda – and every element included here, including some of the language, is easily seen in politicised, divisive, hateful content available today at the tap of a screen.
The performances from the three hosts are superb. The fluency and detail with which they bring these characters to life is intense and is the vital element in making this work of theatre connect its message with us. A single point of weakness is in the translations conveyed via subtitles. Anyone fortunate enough to understand French (through which a lot of the play is performed) will notice a lot of the richness and depth from the characters’ speech is lost in the words we’re shown in English. The oratory from these radio hosts is one of their most compelling elements, especially with Habimana, and this gets defrayed through the subtitles.
Ultimately, it’s the sort of work that should make you reconsider and reflect. Reconsider how you and those close to you engage with media of all sorts. Do we really have the capabilities to analyse what we’re presented now in all our screens and streams across everything from news to TV to Twitch streamers to TikTok and recognise manipulation and harm? And, of course, to reflect on the incredible depths humans can descend to, guarding against it at all costs.
Runs until 22 April
The Reviews Hub Score
Highly effective, jarring
