The chilling reality of Milo Rau’s “Hate Radio,” a 2011 production now showing at St. Ann’s Warehouse, plunges audiences into the heart of historical violence. The play recreates a 1994 radio broadcast by the infamous RTLM, a station in Rwanda used by Hutu hard-liners to incite attacks against the Tutsi minority during the 100-day genocide. Imagine a glass-walled studio where three seemingly genial talk-radio hosts, with headphones on, banter in French, mixing news, political rants, call-in segments, and even history quizzes. They groove to pop hits like Reel 2 Real’s “I Like to Move It” and sing “Be happy, friends! God is always just!” – all while subtly, then overtly, calling for their neighbors’ deaths. These hosts eerily prefigure today’s hipster vulgarians and “tradwife” influencers, spewing racist propaganda and urging slaughter. For instance, presenter Kantano Habimana, played by Diogène Ntarindwa, bizarrely claims, “These people are nihilists,” as he directs his audience toward atrocity.
Director-activist Milo Rau, who was 17 in Switzerland during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, felt a profound connection to the events. Rwanda, often called “the Switzerland of Africa” for its mountainous terrain, felt geographically and culturally close. He observed Rwandans wearing the same T-shirts and listening to the same music, like MC Hammer. This experience shattered his perception of historical atrocities. He reflected, “I was always interested in Auschwitz and the Holocaust. But this was the first genocide that happened with the music I listened to.” RTLM’s strategic use of pop music captivated young Rwandan listeners in a way that conventional state radio could not, amplifying its destructive power. “We were educated in school that Nazis were boring. But then you find out you can play Nirvana and make some jokes, and it has the same effect? That was for me a mind-blowing thing.”
The audience of “Hate Radio” experiences the hate broadcast intimately, reading supertitles and listening through headphones, allowing the propaganda to vibrate directly against the skull. Rau, through his International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM) company, intentionally blurs the lines between performance and reality. This approach often leads to uncomfortable yet exhilarating theater. Carol Martin, author of “Theatre of the Real,” notes that Rau “holds a mirror up to theater” as much as to society, operating “both inside and outside the frame.”
IIPM’s productions consistently delve into episodes of historical violence. “The Last Days of the Ceausescus” (2009) meticulously reconstructed the 1989 trial and swift execution of Nicolae Ceausescu. In “Five Easy Pieces” (2016), Rau collaborated with the children’s theater company CAMPO to create a live documentary about Belgian child-murderer Marc Dutroux, featuring children portraying Dutroux’s father and a victim. Such provocative work inevitably courts controversy. German writer and scholar Florian Malzacher describes this aspect of Rau’s oeuvre as manipulative, suggesting it merely *looks* Brechtian. While Brechtian alienation aims to expose theatrical artifice, Rau’s “exquisitely made pieces” achieve the opposite effect, intensifying emotions. Malzacher explains, “It’s like a magician who shows you how the trick works” and then it “works even better.”
Beyond traditional theater, Malzacher admires Rau’s hybrid projects, which resemble legislative actions or political assemblies. Drawing inspiration from Joseph Beuys, Rau envisions a “social sculpture” where the social organism itself is a communally crafted work of art. A prime example is “The Congo Tribunal” (2015), a 14-hour public hearing on atrocities in eastern Congo, where actual judges, politicians, rebels, and victims testified. Rau documented the event, often integrating film into his stage productions.
Now three years into his directorship of the prestigious Vienna Festival, Rau has transformed it into the “Free Republic of Vienna,” seeking to codify his changes into its constitution. He also launched the “Resistance Now Together” campaign, advocating for a European Artistic Freedom Act. Following the dismissal of artistic director Matej Drlicka from the Slovak National Theater by a far-right government, Rau, who has faced legal scrutiny himself in Austria for his political statements, rallied for a cross-European movement to shield artists from authoritarian regimes. This commitment to political action extends to the “Trial Against Germany” in Hamburg, a “legal-theatrical” investigation into whether the far-right AfD party should be banned.
Given the absence of a comparable public intellectual or aesthetic provocateur in the U.S. theater scene, Rau’s decision to bring three major works to New York within two months is significant. After “Hate Radio,” NYU Skirball will host Édouard Louis’s monologue “The Interrogation” (2021) from March 26-28. On March 29, at Judson Church, Skirball will also present “The Pelicot Trial” (2025), a four-hour reading of documents from the harrowing trial of Dominique Pelicot, convicted for serially drugging his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and inviting dozens of men to rape her.
“The Pelicot Trial” serves as a grim counterpoint to “Hate Radio,” illustrating how easily individuals can dehumanize others. Rau cites Virginia Woolf: “What outside is fascism, is sexism at home.” As nations worldwide grapple with regressive tendencies, such as a party founded by Nazis gaining influence in Austria, Rau persistently scrutinizes the meticulous cruelty found in places like Auschwitz, Rwanda, or even within the confines of the Pelicots’ bedroom. He remarks, “You see it in ‘Hate Radio,’ how it goes slowly. And then it goes very fast.”
The emotional toll of performing such raw material is immense, a question central to Louis’s monologue. Ntarindwa, one of the stars of “Hate Radio,” was himself a 17-year-old soldier in the Rwandan Patriotic Front during the actual broadcasts. Yet, Rau’s performers navigate these difficult roles with remarkable dedication. “That’s always what I say to the actors of ‘Pelicot.’ I tell them, ‘It’s strange, I know, to go onstage and speak the whining monologue of a rapist,’” Rau explains. “‘So you have to do three things: You have to try to understand this figure; you have to do it in a way that we understand. But the first thing is, you have to understand why you do it.’” In a lighter moment during our Zoom interview, Rau grimaced, then laughed, revealing he’d stepped on a needle. “So, OK,” he quipped, “this time my problem of violence is not so big.” This anecdote, even in its triviality, highlights the stark contrast between daily discomforts and the profound violence his work explores.