As his play on Rwanda opens at the National, J T Rogers argues that the horror of genocide defies imagination

As a dramatist, I am often asked this question: "So what's your new play about?" The soundbite-sized description I give for my latest play, The Overwhelming, is this: the Exleys, an American family newly arrived in the Rwandan capital in early 1994, come face to face with the realisation that nothing around them is what they understood it to be. Embroiled in events beyond their understanding, they struggle with matters of life and death. I have found that when I've finished giving this particular description, the response has invariably been a long pause, followed by another question: "Why did you choose that topic?" For a long time, I had no answer. Now, as the play opens at the National Theatre, I realise that I didn't: it chose me.

In some part of my mind, I started working on this play back in April 1994, when I began to read about the genocide that had sprung seemingly from nowhere and engulfed Rwanda. The more newspaper articles I read and the more TV documentaries I watched, the less I understood. Why did it happen? Who was responsible? But the question that I kept coming back to, that I couldn't stop asking my-self, was this: if my life was swallowed by unspeakable horror and every choice open to me was morally monstrous, what would I do? The Overwhelming grew out of an attempt to answer that.

Perhaps surprisingly, I decided to set my play before the genocide. The first reason for this was practical: it is always more gripping to be allowed to imagine the horror of what is to come than to see that horror unfold in front of you. Our minds conjure the diabolical so much better than our eyes can record it. By setting the play on the eve of the horrors, I could write a story about specific individuals - Rwandan, European, American - and the choices they make. I wanted to avoid writing a sweeping tale full of big themes and weighty issues - the kiss of death, to me, for a theatregoing experience.

Second, I realised that if I were to plunge into the maelstrom head first, it would be impossible for me not to write a play whose only message was how sickening this butchery was and how awful it is that the world stood by and let it happen. But who coming to see a play about Rwanda at the National Theatre in 2006 doesn't believe that already? The deeper into this play I wrote, the more I realised that what interested me most was not condemning the horror itself, but look-ing at how it came to be: how good, well-meaning people could be driven to acts of stupefying wickedness.

I started devising The Overwhelming almost two years ago. Throughout that period, while researching, interviewing and writing, the questions never left my mind: "In the face of such horror, what would I do? Who would I be?" In February I went to Rwanda and spent days talking with genocide survivors who had lived through things so horrific that their stories will stay with me for the rest of my life. What was constant in all their experiences of the genocide was the sense of powerlessness in the face of unimaginable terror. In such circumstances, their individuality no longer existed. "We were treated like animals," I heard over and over. "We were killed like animals. We began to think of ourselves as animals."

I realised that the questions themselves rested on my naive assumption that in the face of horror I would still have the luxury of choice: that whatever personal actions I took would matter in the slightest.

One night during my trip, I talked with a man at the bar of the Hôtel des Mille Col-lines. He had survived a massacre of 4,000 people by hiding for days in a pile of dead bodies. The blood around him had been almost a foot high. He lifted his shirt to show me the scars from his bullet wounds. I used the word heroic to describe the fact that he was still alive.

"A hero?" he said dismissively. "What is a hero? Someone who simply lives or does not kill? I think it means more than that." He told me a story, famous in Rwanda, about a group of schoolgirls who stood up to the Interahamwe militia during the genocide. When the killers came to their school and demanded that the girls separate into two groups - Hutu and Tutsi - so that the Tutsis could be slaughtered, the girls refused. "They said, 'We will not do that. We are all Rwandans.'" The man leaned in close to me. "Those are heroes."

What he did not mention is that those girls were then murdered, every single one of them. I doubt I could have done what they did. But I realise now that to wonder whether I could is pointless, for the same reason it would be pointless to set a play during the genocide: a situation so horrific can't be imagined, only experienced.

The Overwhelming runs until 8 August at the Cottesloe, National Theatre,

South Bank, London SE1 (020 7452 3000).

www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

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