Rwandan actors force us to confront our responsibility for genocide The Investigation Young Vic, London SE1

Simplicity, and a growing sense of horror, are the two key notions arising from an utterly compelling production of Peter Weiss's The Investigation, by a Rwandan company, Urwintore. Seven actors, all Rwandan, take to the stage. Speaking clearly and calmly, mostly in French (with English surtitles), and an occasional moment in African dialect, they give eye-witness accounts of a genocide, from the arrival of bewildered prisoners at the extermination camps, to the terrifying details of what went on there. No specific details of place and time are included, but it is clear we are in a court of law, with former prisoners testifying against the guards who tortured and murdered millions.

The piece is directed by Dorcy Rugamba, a Rwandan whose entire family was massacred in April 1994. Somehow the fact that the performers are speaking French, one of the world's most beautiful languages, makes the horrendous descriptions of brutality and fear even worse. The actors, dressed in white, move quietly around the stage, taking turns to be the central figure of attention, interchanging the roles of torturer and victim in carefully considered performances which sit halfway between recital and acting.

And then one of the cast names Josef Mengele, the notorious medical experimenter at Auschwitz. This is not the Rwandan genocide that is being depicted, but the Holocaust. The Investigation, written by Weiss in 1965, takes as its text the shattering testimonies from survivors of the Nazi death camps delivered in court during the 1963-65 Frankfurt war crimes trials. It is still regarded in Germany as one of the most influential plays ever written about the Holocaust. In Rugamba's remarkable production, however, it achieves a further layer of meaning. Indeed, when he devised the piece he was struck by the similarities between the Frankfurt trials and the Gacaca trials in Rwanda, in which the survivors were also enabled to encounter their oppressors, and testify against them.

As the details unfold with calm precision, the chaos of arriving at the camps, the random cruelty and weasel-words of the officers - who claim again and again that they were merely "following orders" - and above all, the unbearable description of prisoners making their way to the gas chambers, fathers holding babies, children clutching at their mothers' skirts, the futility of "Never Again" is starkly apparent.

Although the horrors of Auschwitz are told often in order that they will never happen again, it is only 13 years ago that people were once more being lined up outside remote buildings in the countryside, marched in, and systematically murdered for an invented crime that amounted to "collective racial responsibility".

The actors speak their lines with conviction, not least because they themselves are authentic survivors of genocide. It is a brilliant conceit, providing a spellbinding evening. There is hardly any set to speak of; the stage is almost totally unadorned, and there is no formally integrated dialogue, or not much. But so gripping are the devastating testimonies and stark descriptions that any more theatricality would be a distraction.

With a running time of around 90 minutes, and no interval, this play is shorter than the German original, but it is long enough. Indeed, some of the descriptions are so brutal that on the night I saw it, several people felt it necessary to leave the auditorium. And yet what the production delivers is not just another miserable immersion in the horrors of human madness, but a more provocative perspective.

Knowing that Auschwitz, and Rwanda (and, for that matter, any number of the other genocides across the globe) took place is indeed a burden, but it is not enough. The point behind Rugamba's production - which fuses historical episodes across the century so brilliantly - is that in the end, there is a mass culpability which we must, now, take on board. As one of the actors says: "We must get beyond the fact that the camps are incomprehensible. We produced the camps. The society that produced the camps is our society."

For further info and booking details visit www.youngvic.org

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