Step into a glass-walled studio where three talk-radio hosts are enjoying themselves immensely. Seated around a table, headphones on, they’re relaxed and chatty, their French conversations a lively mix of news, political rants, call-ins, and history quizzes. They sway to pop hits, like Reel 2 Real’s “I Like to Move It” (move it), or even sing along. The year is 1994, the place is Rwanda. “Be happy, friends!” they cheerfully sing, moments before inciting the deaths of their neighbors. “God is always just!”
Milo Rau’s powerful 2011 production, “Hate Radio,” recently opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse. It acts as a chilling diorama, meticulously reconstructing a 1994 radio broadcast from the infamous RTLM station. This broadcast was used by Hutu extremists to incite violence against Rwanda’s Tutsi minority during the 100-day genocide. The play’s hosts, eerily similar to modern podcast personalities or influencers, spew vile, racist propaganda: “These people are nihilists,” presenter Kantano Habimana, portrayed by Diogène Ntarindwa, bizarrely claims, as he drives his listeners towards mass slaughter.
In 1994, Rau himself was a 17-year-old in Switzerland, a nation that historically saw a kinship with Rwanda, often dubbed the “Switzerland of Africa” for its similar mountainous terrain. The genocide’s horrors felt acutely present, far more immediate than historical events confined to textbooks. Rwandans, he noted, wore the same T-shirts and listened to the same music, like MC Hammer. During a recent Zoom conversation, Rau, still weary from opening his new play, “RAGE,” in Sweden and preparing for upcoming engagements in Brussels and Hamburg, shared these reflections.
“I’ve always been drawn to the history of Auschwitz and the Holocaust,” explained Rau, a prolific writer, director, and activist widely considered Europe’s most influential theater maker. “But the Rwandan genocide was the first time such horrors unfolded against a soundtrack of music I recognized.” RTLM’s strategic use of popular music captivated young Rwandan listeners, achieving an impact that traditional state radio couldn’t. “We were taught in school that Nazis were dull. Then you discover that playing Nirvana and cracking jokes can have the same devastating effect? That truly blew my mind.”
The cast of “Hate Radio,” currently running at St. Ann’s Warehouse until February 28, features Diogène Ntarindwa, Bwanga Pilipili, Sébastien Foucault, and Eric Ngangare (background right).
Watching “Hate Radio” makes maintaining analytical distance incredibly challenging. Audiences experience the show through headphones and supertitles, allowing the torrent of hatred to resonate directly within their minds. Rau, through his company, the International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM), deliberately blurs the lines between performance and reality. This approach, while often uncomfortable, is consistently exhilarating. As Carol Martin, author of “Theatre of the Real,” observed, Rau “holds a mirror up to theater” as powerfully as he does to reality itself, existing simultaneously “inside and outside the frame.”
IIPM’s productions consistently confront historical acts of violence. For instance, “The Last Days of the Ceausescus” (2009) saw Rau, Simone Eisenring, and Jens Dietrich re-enact the swift 1989 trial and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu. In “Five Easy Pieces” (2016), IIPM partnered with children’s theater company CAMPO for a live-filmed stage documentary about Belgian child-murderer Marc Dutroux, where children portrayed figures like Dutroux’s father and victims. Reflecting on its 2019 presentation at NYU Skirball, I recall questioning whether Dutroux’s toxic influence might seep into the young performers, or if the act of performance itself was empowering them to resist it.
Rau’s work is certainly not without controversy, which might be precisely his intent. German writer and scholar Florian Malzacher coolly characterizes this aspect of Rau’s oeuvre as manipulative, noting it only “looks very Brechtian.” While Brechtian alienation typically involves revealing theatrical devices—like actors introducing themselves by their real names to deter audience immersion—Rau’s meticulously crafted productions, paradoxically, achieve the opposite. “It’s still about grand emotions,” Malzacher observed by phone, “It’s like a magician who shows you how the trick works” and then it “works even better.”
Safira Robens (left) and Mavie Hörbiger during a presentation of “The Pelicot Trial” in June at a Vienna church. A reading of excerpts from this trial will be staged on March 29 in Manhattan.
However, Malzacher holds deep admiration for Rau’s less theatrical, hybrid projects, such as legislative actions, mock trials, or political assemblies. Here, Rau draws inspiration from Joseph Beuys, the utopian avant-garde artist and “social sculpture” theorist, who envisioned society itself as a collectively created work of art. A prime example is Rau’s 2015 “The Congo Tribunal,” a 14-hour public hearing on atrocities in eastern Congo, where actual judges, politicians, rebels, and victims all provided testimony. Rau also directed a film of this significant event, as many of his theatrical works are intertwined with, or incorporate, documentary filmmaking.
Rau is currently three years into his leadership of the prestigious Vienna Festival, which he audaciously rebranded as the “Free Republic of Vienna” and is now seeking to enshrine his reforms into its very constitution. From this 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—who has faced his own summons before the Austrian Parliament for labeling certain politicians as Nazis—mobilized an inter-European initiative to safeguard artists from autocratic influence. This weekend in Hamburg, his “Resistance Now” project will conduct a five-session “Trial Against Germany,” a “legal-theatrical” inquiry into whether the far-right AfD party should be outlawed.
The American theater landscape currently lacks a public intellectual and aesthetic provocateur quite like Rau. Thus, his decision to bring three of his works to New York within two months offers a valuable “micro-syllabus” in stark realism. Following “Hate Radio,” he will present French writer Édouard Louis’s monologue “The Interrogation” (2021) at NYU Skirball from March 26-28. Then, on March 29, Skirball will host Rau and French dramaturg Servane Dècle at Judson Church for “The Pelicot Trial” (2025), a compelling four-hour reading of documents from last year’s trial of Dominique Pelicot. Pelicot was convicted of serially drugging his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and inviting over forty men to rape her.
Rau understands the challenges his actors face, acknowledging, “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 sense, Rau and Dècle’s “The Pelicot Trial” serves as a poignant counterpart to “Hate Radio,” both illustrating humanity’s chilling capacity for dehumanization. Echoing Virginia Woolf’s sentiment that “What outside is fascism, is sexism at home,” Rau observes how societies globally appear to regress to their darker impulses. He diligently explores the meticulous cruelty found in historical events like Auschwitz and the Rwandan genocide, and even within the intimate confines of the Pelicots’ home. “You see it in ‘Hate Radio,’ how it goes slowly,” he reflected, “And then it goes very fast.”
The Édouard Louis monologue, a candid exploration of how art can absorb one’s identity, directly confronts the inherent cost of creating such challenging work. It asks: where do the boundaries between self and performance blur? Notably, during the original “Hate Radio” broadcasts, Diogène Ntarindwa, one of the current production’s stars and a comedian, was also 17 years old, serving as a soldier in the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
Despite these profound challenges, Rau’s performers consistently rise to the occasion. “That’s what I always tell the actors in ‘The Pelicot Trial,’” Rau explained. “‘It’s strange, I know, to go onstage and deliver the whining monologue of a rapist. So you must do three things: first, try to understand this character; second, deliver it in a way that we, the audience, understand. But most importantly, you must first understand why you are doing it.’”
Suddenly, during our Zoom call, Rau grimaced and bent over. Concerned, I asked if he was alright. “No, no,” he quickly reassured me, “someone left a needle on the ground, and it went into my foot.” He chuckled, holding up the offending object. “So, thankfully,” he quipped, “this time, my problem with violence isn’t quite so severe.”