Endless Horrors in Stage Scripts from the End of the Century: The Representation of Planned Genocide

I close this study with a provisional epilogue, which offers a glimpse at tragic dramaturgy in the last decades of the century (to which I plan to devote a future study) within the radical renewal of Western theatre since the late sixties.

It takes the form of an advance on two fronts. The first is thematic, it is the subject of this book taken to its extreme, the greatest and undoubtedly the most hateful transgression of the limit in this century: genocide, of which we saw a memorable anticipation in Grotowski's Akropolis. The second concerns the form and theory of theatre.

I will briefly examine two texts for the stage that are extraordinary in their lucidity, emotional impact, effectiveness and originality of form: Rwanda 94 and Ruhe. They are both Belgian productions, one from the French-speaking region and the other the Flemish. They are writings for the stage which did not originate from a dramatic text, in keeping with a custom widespread in this period. They are profoundly and dramatically concerned with eternal and unresolved questions about the structures of human and social coexistence. They foreground the two nuclei of tragedy: the transgression of the limit, including the most extreme and unimaginable excesses, and the irreducible conflict that pits one person against another, going to the extreme of murdering opposition groups identified by unfounded theories of ethnic identity and race.