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PRESS REVIEWS

THE OVERWHELMING

Daily Telegraph - Charles Spencer (19 May 2006)

I'm uneasily aware that there's almost nothing I can say that will make you want to see this play. It's about the genocide in Rwanda, and I bet you are already scanning the page to find something more palatable to read.

I know how you feel. Flying back from New York recently, Hotel Rwanda was one of the movies on offer, and I didn't even consider watching it. I mean who needs it, Africans, in a far-off country of which we know little, killing each other with machetes? Why put yourself through it? And isn't there something faintly pornographic about ogling such atrocities anyway?

Yet the American writer JT Rogers's powerful new drama in the Cottesloe doesn't turn out like that. Indeed, The Overwhelming strikes me as not only the best new play I've seen this year, but also, and this is the really startling thing, one of the most entertaining.

The dramatist has rightly realised that there's little point in putting a parade of graphic horrors on stage.

The only response is to feel slightly sick, shake your head, and say: "Isn't it terrible?" Instead, he sets his play on the eve of the genocide, in which 800,000 people died, and tries to make us understand the rancorous hatred in a country both divided and defined by the tribal rift between Hutus and Tutsis.

The drama has both comic and thriller-like elements, and something of the atmosphere of a Graham Greene novel. Jack Exley is a white, middle-aged American academic, with a young black wife and a disaffected teenage son from a previous marriage in tow. He desperately needs to come up with a book to save his flagging, untenured career, and thinks his old college room-mate, now a selfless Tutsi doctor, might provide the central strand of a tome about the way individuals can make a difference in a violent world.

When he arrives in Rwanda, however, his friend has disappeared, and none of the authorities, from government officials to embassy staff and UN observers, seem interested in trying to discover where he's gone. Exley's concern for his friend is accompanied by even sharper anxiety about his career.

The action develops in a series of short, sharp scenes, which bring a host of characters to vivid life and make the fault-lines in Rwanda just before the carnage began crystal clear.

The play raises tough questions - just how much can outside agencies do to prevent a country from going to hell in a handcart? How far will well-intentioned individuals go when their own safety is threatened? It is also refreshing to find a piece about Africa that doesn't blame everything on the evils of colonialism.

Max Stafford-Clark directs a superb production for the NT and Out of Joint. There are some excellent jokes as the Americans blunder around in a country they don't understand, and the issues are laid before us with this director's usual, illuminating clarity. And in the final scenes, the dramatic tension becomes excruciating.

Among the cast, Matthew Marsh is outstanding as the increasingly desperate academic, while Danny Sapani is creepily compelling as an apparently amiable Rwandan government official. Among the support, William Armstrong as a craven US embassy hand, Jude Akuwudike as the missing and highly enigmatic doctor, and Tanya Moodie as Marsh's bolshie wife, shine particularly brightly, but there isn't a single dud performance.

I have one suggestion: would it be possible to combine this outstanding drama with a separate, verbatim piece based on the moving personal testimonies the dramatist and director gathered on a research trip to Rwanda? I have a hunch that such a double-bill would prove dramatically devastating.

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Time Out - Rachel Halliburton (22 May 2006)

5 stars

It’s striking that ‘The Overwhelming’ is opening just as ‘My Name Is Rachel Corrie’ closes at the Playhouse Theatre. Both works illustrate very differently the crisis faced by the Western liberal when confronted by the violent realities of another country’s politics. In Rachel Corrie’s case, her pro-Palestinian campaign famously ended in tragedy, but while the characters in ‘The Overwhelming’ escape with their lives, they are dogged by dirty compromise. International relations expert Jack Exley brings his family out to Rwanda in early 1994 so he can write about a paediatric AIDS doctor (Jude Akuwudike) who he believes has changed history, but discovers instead that he himself is no more than a pawn in the country’s shift towards genocide.

‘The Overwhelming’ has been criticised for falling short on political detail, but in the eternal political dramatist’s dilemma – should he or she risk turning characters into mouthpieces on legs, or avoid this by sacrificing historical context? – I feel that playwright JT Rogers has come down on the right side. The result’s a gripping political thriller which refracts the developing humanitarian crisis through the eyes of a super-articulate trio of Americans – frustrated academic Jack (Matthew Marsh), his journalist Afro-American wife Linda (Tanya Moodie) and his resentful hyper-educated son (arresting new talent Andrew Garfield) – who find themselves steeped in political quicksand when they try to find out why the AIDS doctor has disappeared.

Director Max Stafford-Clark has managed brilliantly to evoke the murkily kaleidoscopic agendas of the different players in pre-genocide Rwanda, as well as capturing the sense of terror when the division between political discussion and murder is membrane-thin. Maybe you could learn more about the precise details of Rwanda from a newspaper article, but this is a visceral, deeply provoking work which asks profoundly relevant questions in a world where each month brings ever greater challenges to the liberal conscience.

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Daily Mail - Quentin letts (19/05/06)

5 stars

Here is a fast, frightening, watchable play about the Rwandan civil war of 1994. That may make it 12 years late in some ways – 12 years too late to save the poor souls who died at that atrocious time – yet it does a fine business in retelling a savage story.

You readers, hearing ‘Rwanda’, may avert your eyes and ears. Your heads may fill with memories of TV news reports about Hutus killing Tutsis and vice versa. Most of us watched those balanced, blood-stained bulletins and were left muddled.

What this play does, among other things, is prove theatre’s ability to elucidate. You leave with your interest pricked by the miserable, mad business of the Rwandan massacres.

A white America political scientist (Matthew Marsh) has come to the Rwandan capital Kigali to write an academic book about African healthcare. The local doctor he hopes to interview, however, has gone missing. The man (Jude Akuwudike) is a Tutsi.

The American goes to the his embassy. He goes to the police. His black American wife (Tanya Moodie) befriends a prominent Kigali politician (Danny Sapani). Only later does she learn that he is a hardline Hutu who ‘makes Idi Amin look like a choirboy’.

On the surface the politician is the model of courtesy but slowly it becomes clear that he is manipulative and untrustworthy. The dramatic tension ratchets up because we see his deviousness long before the Americans notice it.

At first the visitors are charmed by Rwanda. Their teenage son (Andrew Garfield) gets his leg over with a Tutsi hooker.

The first half has plenty of levity, specked only by the occasional rumble of menace such as when the dodgy politician calls Rwanda ‘the Switzerland of Africa – the people take orders very well’.

Alert theatregoers will also notice, amid a gaudy set, that a pile of market cabbages look not entirely unlike a mound of skulls.

Then comes the second half and a UN soldier tells the naïve US academic that ‘we are a small, dirty Band-Aid on a large festering wound’. There are startlingly brisk lines about how the world little notices the death of a black man. The finale, when the American clasps hold of his son, is a moment to kick an parent in the gut.

Playwright J.T. Rogers does not overdo the drama in this powerful lament for Rwanda. He satirises earnest Westerners but he also slaps us round the face and tells us to be grateful for the stability of our society.

Direction is by Max Stafford-Clark, who a year or so ago did an amazingly violent Macbeth set in Africa.

The National distinguishes itself with this production.

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The Independent - Paul Taylor (22 May 2006)

4 stars

The Rwandan genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered, is the theme of two recent films - Hotel Rwanda and Shooting Dogs. But The Overwhelming, the powerful new play by J T Rogers, is, to the best of my knowledge, the first stage treatment of the subject. It is set in early 1994 as tension mounts between the majority Hutu population and the minority Tutsis. We see the build-up to disaster, the intractability of the hostilities in Rwanda, and the indifference of outsiders from a newly arrived US family's perspective.

Jack (Matthew Marsh), an academic, is writing a book on activism and wants to focus on an old Rwandan college friend, Joseph (Jude Akuwudike), a Tutsi who now runs a children's HIV clinic in Kigali. Invited by Joseph, he travels to Rwanda, taking his wife (Tanya Moodie) and his estranged 17- year-old son (Andrew Garfield), who has just lost his mother.

But when they arrive, Joseph has vanished. While Jack makes enemies by investigating his disappearance, his son enjoys a sexual initiation in Kigali and the wife, researching for a book of her own, comes under the spell of a persuasive, deceptively friendly Hutu "patriot" (Danny Sapani).

Premiered in Max Stafford-Clark's immaculate and engrossing co-production between the National and Out of Joint, the play, to some effect, places the audience in the same position as the newcomers - out of its depth in a society where there has been a complete breakdown of trust. There's a fine narrative stealth in the gradual way Rogers exposes the scale of the mutual animosity and a terrible pathos in the excerpts from an earlier hopeful letter from Joseph.

As he's supposed to be a specialist in international relations, it's hard to credit the degree of Jack's initial pontificating naivety. But his political awakening - in biting scenes with obstructive police chiefs ("Hutu do not get Aids. Aids is a Tutsi sickness") and UN Majors, NGOs, embassy officials and other "realists" all resigned to not intervening - is arrestingly dramatised. The play refuses to introduce any false sense of redemption. Though it has flaws, it fulfils Shelley's words - that art should help us "to imagine what we know" - and offers a rousing rebuke to indifference.

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Evening Standard - Nicholas de Jongh (May 2006)

4 stars

Anyone who believes our insular theatre, obsessed by middleclass adultery and youth stuffing itself with sex and drugs, while plays contending with the big troubles of the wider world are unwanted, ought to be refreshed by JT Rogers's The Overwhelming.

This remarkable polemic achieves the emotional impact that TV news bulletins and newspapers rarely manage. The play, in a deftly effective and powerfully acted production by Max Stafford-Clark for his impressive Out of Joint Company, takes on the complexities of the 1994 Rwandan civil war.

In that genocidal bloodbath, the ruling Hutus fought the Tutsis and left 800,000 dead, while the UN and America fought a vain war of words over who would pay for peace-keeping.

Rogers's provocative idea is to argue that a country's foreign policy is dictated by self interest rather than humanity. The war is approached from the perspective of an American academic, Matthew Marsh's impassioned Jack Exley.

Exley, his black second wife and teenage son in tow, arrives in Rwanda to research a book with his friend, the Aids doctor Joseph Gasana.

The fact that Gasana disappears without trace sets Jack searching.

Composed, as if for TV, in more than 40 scenes, each one of which is supposed to "shift into the next without pause", Rogers requires that the play fly along "without stopping for breath".

Tim Shortall's composite set, with its ecclesiastical back-cloth and paved central area, ought to be more pliable and multifariously evocative.

Yet The Overwhelming's characterising sense of speed, fluidity and anxiety, as hotel room gives way to hospital office or market place, is beautifully conveyed in Stafford-Clark's production, even if it requires Fergal Keane's programme article to appreciate the nuances of Hutu-Tutsi hostility.

Tension rises inexorably. Rogers sets up three parallel narratives, which illuminate a conspiratorial country riven by fear, loathing and arbitrary executions of Tutsis.

Exley's novelist wife (Tanya Moodie) is taken up by Danny Sapani's Hutu government official, his unhappy son (charismatic Andrew Garfield) by a Hutu guard and a tart.

Exley's battle to discover Jude Akuwudike's Gasana, who serves as an epistolatory narrator, leads him into the corrupt heart of Rwandan darkness where Tutus are regarded as evil incarnate.

The finale, with its emblematic coup de theatre, brings this war into close, ghastly focus. The Overwhelming gives political theatre serious allure.

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Sunday Times - John Peter (28 May 2006)

4 stars

Harrowing is an understatement for JT Rogers’s play. Set in Rwanda on the eve of the Tutsi genocide, it’s about Jack (Matthew Marsh), an American academic researching a book he needs to publish to secure his tenure. His host, a Tutsi doctor, has disappeared. Without him, there’s no book. Can Jack save him? He knows little about the country, and understands less. His wife, a black American writer (Tanya Moodie), is not much better, though more in tune with the place. The resident US embassy official is cheerily indifferent. Mizinga, a government official, is suspiciously breezy. Who can Jack trust? Under Max Stafford-Clark’s masterful direction the tension grows, imperceptibly, to the point of suffocation. Rogers is too good a historian simply to sit back and blame the Belgians for the mess they left behind. No, this is about the presumptuous ignorance of the West in using Africa as a moral and political experiment. It’s also about the implacable need in all nations to find an enemy, then kill, kill, kill. The theatre is a tribunal whose task is to present the bloody evidence and ask what you think of yourself as a member of the human race. I have seldom seen this task performed with such unprejudiced but devastating power.

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Mail on Sunday - Georgina Brown (21 May 2006)

4 stars

The Overwhelming, J.T. Rogers’s new play, takes us back to one of the most terrible tragedies of our times, the Rwandan genocide, capturing the atmosphere of terror, hatred and brutality in Kigali in 1994.

American Academic Jack Exley moves to Rwanda with his black writer wife and his son from a previous marriage to write a book about grassroots activists, He wants to focus on an old friend who runs an AIDS clinic, only to find he has vanished.

His search becomes a lesson in the terrifying way things (don’t) work in Rwanda. Exley, surprisingly naïve for a political scientist, discovers much he didn’t know: the senseless hatred between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, the powerlessness of UN forces (‘we’re a small dirty Band-Aid on a large festering wound’) and the uselessness of the American ambassador.

Less satisfactorily, Rogers has the wife discovering what it is to be a black woman in a black country and the boy enjoying his sexual initiation courtesy of a local prostitute.

Max Stafford-Clark’s fluid, fast-moving and superbly performed production grips like an old-fashioned-thriller. More importantly, it leaves you with a real fear that, if we let it, history could repeat itself elsewhere in the world.

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