Hate Radio

Rwanda, 1994. A radio broadcast sparks the most brutal genocide since the end of the Cold War. Rwandan society is swept away by the idea of eradicating a minority in the name of peace and freedom. According to American journalist Philip Gourevitch, “If we were looking for a quick and efficient way to put a stop to the genocide in Rwanda, stopping RTLM [Radio Télévision Mille Collines]'s broadcasts would have been a good start.” During the months leading up to the 100 days of massacre, RTLM’s radio hosts spread political lampoons and explicit calls to murder on the airwaves between Congolese pop songs and international hits.

Thirty-one years on, an award-winning dramatist reconstructs a radio broadcast from RTLM using eyewitness accounts, studies, and reports of real-life events during the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. Audiences are immersed in RTLM's station and its chilling hate-media broadcasts that demonized a population and ignited a genocide that claimed nearly a million lives. The realism of the staging highlights the cruelty of words drowned in the banality of the everyday at a radio which closes, like every night, with Joe Dassin's “Le dernier slow.” 

Hate Radio confronts the human cost of propaganda and the frightening ease with which violence spreads. Hate Radio is a heart-rending theatre of the real which reminds us all that, beyond emotion, words can kill.

The acclaimed Swiss theatre director, journalist, and lecturer Milo Rau brings their award-winning piece Hate Radio to St. Ann’s Warehouse after touring more than twenty countries.

“Treads the line between the absolutely normal…and the utterly unthinkable.” 
—The Scotsman