Photo by Daniel Seiffert

Hate Radio by Milo Rau – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Milo Rau’s Hate Radio takes us into the heart of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when Hutus rose up following the assassination of the President, and slaughtered their Tutsi neighbours using whatever they could lay their hands on. Thirty years on it remains one of humanity’s darkest episodes. As a character in the play notes, it is not just that ordinary people – a priest’s son for example – became enthusiastic murderers, but that they went to extraordinary lengths to torture, rape and mutilate their victims. Up to 662,000 people died.

Orchestrating the killing from an office building in the capital, Kigali, was RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) a pro-Hutu radio station which denounced Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’ and broadcast details of their whereabouts so vigilantes could find and kill them. Rau’s play sets the scene with filmed testimony from four genoicide survivors, whose accounts are jaw-droppingly terrible. Then we are in the studio, during an hour-long show with three hosts and their MC/link man, which plays out in real time. We hear the relentless pushing of hatred, the repetition of racial slurs, the historical propaganda and the lies. It is like verbatim theatre, replaying real life events in all its ordinariness and horror. It is relentless and chilling – and extraordinary. It is impossible to turn away for a moment.

The three presenters are real characters: Kantano Habimamba (Diogène Ntarindwa), Valérie Bemeriki (Olga Mouak) and Georges Ruggiu (Sébastien Foucault), all now either in prison or vanished, presumed dead. Their interplay is hosts is horribly convincing, and their voices (the play is in French and Kinyarwanda, with subtitles) pound into our heads through the headphones we wear, making the show seem both intimate and separate, just as real radio does. Some of the moments that stay in the mind pass without comment such as when Kantano, as he was known, takes off his jacket revealing that he the gun strapped to his business shirt. Or they are heart-stopping, especially when the radio show goes to a song, each track played in full. Nirvana’s ‘Rape Me’, complete with enthusiastic drumming from the presenters, is almost impossible to bear. The way Kantano dances wildly in his suit to Reel 2 Reel’s ‘I Like to Move It’ encapsulates the frenzy of killing. And the show’s sign-off song, Joe Dassin’s ‘Le Dernier Slow’, is staggeringly sinister and intensely sad. Hate Radio is a stunning piece of theatre, showing us utter evil in all its ordinariness, and delivering a timely warning. If it happened then, it can happen again.