Thomas Nyarwaya in Peter Weiss's Holocaust play The Investigation. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
How do you present some of the biggest crimes in the history of humanity on stage? Do artists even have a right to try and tackle things like the holocaust or the Rwandan genocide in their work?
The philosopher Theodor Adorno once said that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Is the creative imagination, then (the chief tool of any artist), simply too feeble, too profoundly inadequate to fully comprehend the awesome and extreme cruelty of these acts of destruction? Does any attempt to recreate what happened through fiction run the risk of misrepresenting or belittling the events with the result being yet another betrayal of the dead?
If you look at many of the plays and films that have arisen in response to these events it becomes clear that those who create them are acutely aware of this problem. The Young Vic's current production of Peter Weiss's Holocaust play The Investigation is a good example. The play itself is based entirely on the verbatim transcripts of the Frankfurt war crimes trials.
Though the show is deliberately quite static in its staging, it gains its power not just from the testimony that is delivered, but from the fact that the actors performing it are from Rwanda and the Congo, and have, like their director Dorcy Rugamba, firsthand experience of very similar events.
The show derives its authority and strength from its absolute authenticity as much as from any creative or interpretive decisions made by the company. This was similarly the case with Rash at this year's Edinburgh fringe. Performed by Jenni Wolfson, an actor and former humanitarian aid worker in Rwanda, it tied together her personal journey and her eyewitness testimony (complete with some graphic and disturbing slides) of the genocide's aftermath.
Of course, adhering too closely to the historical record can be problematic. Miracle in Rwanda which was based on the autobiography of one survivor, Immaculee Ilibagiza, was a big hit in Edinburgh this year. But as Maxie Szalawinska has pointed out, it is questionable as to why it was so successful. The piece was well-meaning but simplistic and seemed to do little more than provide edited highlights of Ilibagiza's story - there was scant room for the context or reflection on events that we see in other, similar shows. Perhaps what moved people was the simple fact of her experience rather than anything to do with how it was communicated.
Yet even when storytellers try to go beyond just a literal representation of testimonies, concrete reality has a habit of crashing through into the fictionalised world. The films Hotel Rwanda, Shooting Dogs and Sometimes in April are all (to a greater or lesser degree) loose dramatisations of true events. But with all of these, the use of documentary news footage becomes a regular feature. One recurring sequence is that of Christine Shelley, the spokesperson for the US state department, trying to justify her administration's total lack of action to halt what was happening. Her desperate semantic wrangling as she tries to distinguish between "genocide" and "acts of genocide" makes for a shocking contrast to the horror of what we see.
In all these cases, it seems that the magnitude of what happened is such that these artists have conceded that the creative imagination really isn't enough to truly comprehend it.
