Within a seemingly ordinary glass-walled studio, three talk-radio hosts are jovially engaging with their audience. Headphones on, they chat, discuss news, hurl political insults, and entertain callers with history quizzes, largely in French. They even dance to the DJ’s pop hits, like Reel 2 Real’s “I Like to Move It” (move it), often singing along. But this isn’t just any broadcast; it’s 1994, Rwanda, and their cheerful cries of “Be happy, friends!” and “God is always just!” are chillingly interspersed with explicit calls for the murder of their neighbors.
Milo Rau’s stark and unsettling 2011 production, “Hate Radio,” now showing at St. Ann’s Warehouse, functions as a living diorama. It meticulously reconstructs a 1994 broadcast from the notorious RTLM station. This was the platform Hutu extremists exploited to incite violence against the Tutsi minority during Rwanda’s horrific 100-day genocide. As the audience, we witness hosts — eerily similar to today’s sensationalist podcasters or right-wing influencers – unleash a torrent of racist propaganda. Presenter Kantano Habimana (Diogène Ntarindwa), for example, absurdly labels his victims “nihilists” while openly advocating for their massacre.
In 1994, a 17-year-old Rau, growing up in Switzerland — a nation that saw itself as a distant relative to Rwanda, even dubbing it “the Switzerland of Africa” due to its mountainous terrain — felt the genocide’s brutality firsthand. The unfolding atrocities felt more immediate and real than any historical account. Rwandans, he observed, wore the same casual clothes and listened to the same pop artists, like MC Hammer, as he did. (During our Zoom conversation, the constantly traveling Rau, still weary from premiering his new play, “RAGE,” in Sweden, shared plans to be in Brussels and Hamburg in the following days.)
Rau, a renowned writer, director, and activist widely considered Europe’s most influential theater maker, explained his fascination with the Holocaust, but noted: “This was the first genocide that happened with the music I listened to.” He found RTLM’s strategic use of popular music incredibly potent, capturing young Rwandan listeners far more effectively than traditional state radio. “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 ensemble performing in “Hate Radio” at St. Ann’s Warehouse until February 28 features, from left: Diogène Ntarindwa, Bwanga Pilipili, Sébastien Foucault, and in the background, Eric Ngangare.
It’s nearly impossible to keep an analytical distance when experiencing “Hate Radio.” As the audience, we’re immersed through supertitles and headphones, feeling the raw impact of hate directly. Milo Rau, with his International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM) company, intentionally blurs the lines between performance and reality. This approach, while often unsettling, is consistently electrifying. As Carol Martin, author of “Theatre of the Real” (2013), explains, Rau simultaneously “holds a mirror up to theater” and to life itself, operating “both inside and outside the frame.”
IIPM’s productions consistently delve into incidents of historical brutality. For instance, “The Last Days of the Ceausescus” (2009) saw Rau, Simone Eisenring, and Jens Dietrich meticulously reconstruct the hasty 1989 trial and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu. In “Five Easy Pieces” (2016), IIPM partnered with CAMPO, a children’s theater, to create a live-shot stage documentary about Belgian child-murderer Marc Dutroux. Children portray Dutroux’s father and a victim, leading to profound questions. When this production came to NYU Skirball in 2019, I pondered whether the disturbing themes could affect Rau’s young performers, or if, conversely, the act of performance empowered them to confront such darkness.
Rau’s work is certainly not without controversy, a factor that might even be central to its intent. German writer and scholar Florian Malzacher, somewhat coolly, characterizes this aspect of Rau’s art as manipulative, suggesting it only “looks very Brechtian.” Brechtian alienation aims to expose theatricality—for instance, by actors introducing themselves with real names—to prevent audience seduction. Yet, Malzacher observed in a phone interview, Rau’s exquisitely made pieces achieve the opposite: “It’s still about grand emotions.” He likens it to “a magician who shows you how the trick works” only for the magic to “works even better.”
Safira Robens (left) and Mavie Hörbiger are seen in a June presentation of “The Pelicot Trial” at a Vienna church. A reading of these powerful trial excerpts is scheduled for March 29 in Manhattan.
Malzacher, however, deeply respects Rau’s less conventional, hybrid projects, such as legislative actions, mock trials, or political assemblies. In these endeavors, Rau channels Joseph Beuys, the avant-garde artist who championed “social sculpture”—the idea that society itself can be a communal work of art. A prime example is Rau’s 2015 “The Congo Tribunal,” a grueling 14-hour public hearing on atrocities in eastern Congo. Real judges, politicians, rebels, and victims all gave testimony, with Rau himself directing a documentary film of the proceedings. Indeed, many of his theatrical pieces are developed concurrently with, or directly within, a documentary framework.
Currently three years into his leadership of the prestigious Vienna Festival, Rau has boldly proclaimed it the “Free Republic of Vienna,” actively working to integrate his reforms into its founding principles. From this influential platform, he launched the “Resistance Now Together” campaign, advocating for the European Parliament to enact a European Artistic Freedom Act. Following the dismissal of artistic director Matej Drlicka from the Slovak National Theater by a far-right Slovakian government, Rau – no stranger to political controversy himself, having been questioned by the Austrian Parliament for labeling politicians as Nazis – galvanized a pan-European effort to shield artists from autocratic interference. This very weekend in Hamburg, his “Resistance Now” initiative will host a five-session “Trial Against Germany,” a “legal-theatrical” inquiry into the potential ban of the far-right AfD party.
The American theater landscape currently lacks a public intellectual or provocative aesthetic force quite like Rau. Therefore, his decision to bring three significant works to New York within two months offers a compelling ‘micro-syllabus’ in unflinching realism. Following “Hate Radio,” he will present French writer Édouard Louis’s powerful monologue “The Interrogation” (2021) at NYU Skirball from March 26-28. Then, on March 29, Skirball and Judson Church will host Rau alongside French dramaturg Servane Dècle for “The Pelicot Trial” (2025), a four-hour reading of documents from last year’s shocking trial. This case saw Dominique Pelicot convicted of serially drugging his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and facilitating her rape by over four dozen men.
Rau admits that his work presents significant challenges for actors. He often instructs them, “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 profound sense, Rau and Dècle’s “The Pelicot Trial” mirrors “Hate Radio,” both starkly illustrating humanity’s eagerness to dehumanize others. Citing Virginia Woolf, Rau reflected, “What outside is fascism, is sexism at home.” As societies globally appear to regress towards their darker impulses—such as a party founded by Nazis gaining power in Austria—Rau unflinchingly investigates the horrific, meticulous cruelty evident in events like Auschwitz, the Rwandan genocide, and even the Pelicots’ intimate tragedy. “You see it in ‘Hate Radio,’ how it goes slowly,” he observed, “And then it goes very fast.”
Édouard Louis’s monologue, a deeply personal exploration of art’s potential to absorb identity, confronts the inherent cost of creating such challenging work. It probes the boundaries where personal self and theatrical performance blur. Notably, Diogène Ntarindwa, one of “Hate Radio’s” stars and a comedian, was also 17 and a soldier in the Rwandan Patriotic Front during the actual radio broadcasts.
Despite the immense difficulty, each of Rau’s performers manages to embrace their roles. “That’s always what I say to the actors of “Pelicot,”’ Rau explained. ‘I tell them, “It’s strange, I know, to go onstage and speak the whining monologue of a rapist.” 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.”
Mid-Zoom call, Rau suddenly grimaced and bent over. Concerned, I asked if he was alright. “No, no,” he quickly reassured me, “somebody put the needle here on the ground, and it was going in my foot.” He then laughed, holding up the offending object. “So, OK, this time my problem of violence is not so big.”