Gathering genocide

There are a thousand questions still to be answered about the Rwandan genocide. One is whether anything could have been done to stop it.

American playwright JT Rogers believes he has the answer to that.

"Every genocide survivor we met in Rwanda, be they Tutsi or Hutu, said they had no idea that the genocide was about to happen. They all thought those calls to murder on the radio in the days beforehand were a black joke.

"It sounds crazy today, with the benefit of hindsight, but the thing is, no one had any idea."

Twelve years after the world watched the murder of 800,000 Rwandans in the space of 100 days, Western writers are tackling the subject.

Rogers's play The Overwhelming, which receives its world premiere this week, follows a glut of films and books on the subject: Shooting Dogs, Hotel Rwanda, A Sunday At The Pool In Kigali and Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Children among others.

Some of these have been more interested in what happened in those 100 days; others in how it happened and why we let it.

Rogers has tackled his own questions about the genocide by setting his play two months before it began and basing it around an American writer who has come to interview an inspiring Rwandan doctor for a book.

But the doctor, a Tutsi, has disappeared and Jack's innocent efforts to find him lead him into desperate and treacherous water as the Hutu Power movement gathers pace.

"I was thunderstruck by Rwanda at the time," says Rogers.

"Then the more I read about it, the more complex it became in ways that were never presented by the American press. But it's not interesting to tell an audience that what happened in Rwanda was unbelievably awful; that there was a lot of moral cowardice and that the UN refused to intervene.

"Instead, I wanted to write about people in situations where they had terrible decisions to make: the type of decisions nearly all of us would never normally consider to be a part of our lives."

After Rogers wrote The Overwhelming, he went to Rwanda with the director Max Stafford-Clark.

"There was this extraordinary need among survivors to talk about what happened," he says. "It was like going through a maelstrom and I had to give over to that, even though a lot of it wasn't going to be in the play."