The Stage

The Overwhelming

Published Thursday 18 May 2006 at 12:15 by Jeremy Austin

JT Rogers’ powerful drama - set in Kigali, Rwanda, just before 1994’s genocide - is powerful and evocative, yet somehow those words do not seem to do justice to just how effectively the audience is transported physically into the gaping mouth of Hell that Rwanda became.

Here we have the madness of the situation, a situation that seemingly no-one and everyone wanted. The simmering tensions between the Hutus and the Tutsis, co-existing before neighbours turned on neighbours.

And here too we have the lack of interest and understanding that the West showed the situation. The colonial French meddling as if still in power and the Americans unconcerned.

Rogers is a very economic playwright, journalistic almost, finding the most effective way to convey the truth of his characters while being as efficient with the language as he can. The result adds to the sense of realism within the piece, as does Max Stafford-Clark’s smooth direction, under which the scenes bleed into each other and there is no time for dramatics.

Matthew Marsh is Jack Exley, a fading academic who needs to interview his freedom fighting friend Doctor Joseph Gasana if he is to save his career. He is the liberal American abroad, full of answers and self-righteousness but hamstrung by ignorance. His frustration is palpable.

His wife, African-American Linda White-Keeler (Tanya Moodie), is worse. Glib to the point of self-delusional, she hides from the horrors behind a romantic, middle class veneer. She asks not what she can do for the country but what the country can do for her.

Jude Akuwudike as Gasana conveys the internalised struggle his character faces - hiding the horrors he has committed from his friends - while Chipo Chung as his wife almost blanches the stage with her character’s fear. A brilliant and horrifying evening’s theatre.