Kept their Humanity

Kept their Humanity
Smirnoff Underbelly, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: The Hole in the Ground Theatre Company

Dolan Cummings

'Who the hell cares about Rwanda?' Kept Their Humanity is dominated by a political message, but one that is detached from any broader political analysis. The West ought to have used force earlier in Rwanda to prevent the slaughter. It's only respectable opinion, of course, but it rests on moral horror rather than political argument.

Of course, it is not the job of a playwright to make political arguments, but a play so heavily dominated by politics has to do more than vent frustration, and ultimately, Kept Their Humanity fails to convince as a play.

For a start, it is often hard to see the story for the writing. The author uses similes like a bad cook uses garlic. Black smoke rises from the president's crashed plane like a country haemorrhaging sanity; loss hangs like an aura around a bereaved girl, a stench hangs like a wall around the hilltop. Hangs like a wall? Anyway, you can see these phrases written on the page, and perhaps even the author's pen 'suspended above its pristine white surface'. What you can't see is Rwanda.

I don't want to criticise the play for focusing on white Westerners rather than Rwandans. The Western response to the slaughter is a perfectly valid subject for a play. Unfortunately Kept Their Humanity does not contribute to our response, or to our understanding. The north American protagonists, a UN soldier and a journalist, struggle to keep their humanity in the face of mind-boggling violence. That's all very well, but the real challenge for anyone trying to understand what happened in Rwanda is accounting for the humanity of the people who conducted the mass murder.

How is it that ordinary and presumably at one time decent people turned on their neighbours with machetes? The closest we get to an answer is when the American journalist suggests that Tutsi reprisals against Hutus are justified. The Tutsi RPF is portrayed as a smiling army of liberation, the Hutus as inhuman monsters. Maybe this is how it happens? The subtlety here is welcome, but it seems to be unintentional.

At one point the Hutu militias are described as 'the most effective killing machine ever assembled'. It is hard to imagine what kind of definitions might have led to such a statement. On a purely technical level, the most effective killing machine ever assembled is surely the US military with its nuclear arsenal. In terms of actual killing, the Nazis take the plaudits.

This kind of hyperbole is born of understandable moral outrage, but like the play as a whole, it detracts from rather than emphasising the seriousness of its subject.

31 July to 24 August.