You can't blame Emir Hadzihafizbegovic's Raphael Lemkin for looking angry. Having escaped the Holocaust and invented the word "genocide", he has spent his final years in a fruitless attempt to persuade the US Congress to ratify a bill that would recognise genocide as an international crime against humanity.
Then, as Catherine Filloux's play has it, Lemkin dies in 1959, only to be haunted by victims and perpetrators of all the genocides in the years since. Stuck in a particularly cruel purgatory, he is confronted by Hutus and Tutsis from the Rwandan slaughter, a woman from a Serbian rape camp and a shell-shocked man from the Srebrenica massacre.
Lemkin is no more powerful in death to do anything against these violations than he was in life. Worse, he comes to realise, that even though the United States finally recognised genocide as a crime in 1986, its government officials prefer obfuscation to using the "G word".
By the end of the 90-minute play, three corpses lie covered with the flags of Europe, the UN and the US, a symbolic suggestion that the developed world is ultimately responsible for these atrocities. This, as the G8 leaders gather in Gleneagles, is the reason this austere production from Sarajevo's Kamerni Teatar 55 is being presented in Scotland now.
Filloux, an American dramatist whose work has looked at the Khmer Rouge and Middle Eastern honour killings, offers a bleak vision of a brutal and uncaring world. It's hard not to leave the theatre as defeated and despairing as some of her helpless characters.
You wonder who benefits when even a sympathetic audience is made to feel like giving in. More of an issue, however, is that the play is performed almost entirely in Serbo-Croatian. This is a production that is very reliant on language.
· At the Arches, Glasgow, on Friday and Saturday. Box office: 0870 240 7528.
