Scar tissue

On the afternoon of April 6 1994, Dorcy Rugamba was in Butare visiting a sick aunt when his father - 80 miles away in the Rwandan capital, Kigali - phoned. "Don't come back," he said. "Stay where you are, for the time being at least. It's not looking good." Early the next morning, he called again. "It's looking bad," he said. "We're taking shelter in the corridor. If the number in the living room doesn't answer, try the one in the bedroom." The corridor between the bedrooms was, Rugamba knew, the safest place in the house: to hit you, a bullet would have to pass through at least two walls.

When Rugamba rang the phone in the living room a few hours later, there was no answer. He tried the bedroom. No answer either. Later, his younger brother rang. "Some soldiers came," he said. "They took us into the garden and shot us. Everyone is dead."

On that morning, Rugamba's father, Cyprien - a respected writer, researcher, teacher and artistic director of the Amasimbi n'Amakombe traditional dance company - was killed. So were his mother and six of his siblings. The only members of the 12-strong family left alive were Rugamba himself, two sisters who were also away from home and their 16-year-old brother, who had somehow dragged himself unscathed from the mound of still-warm corpses in the garden after the soldiers left.

This was the first day of Rwanda's genocide. Over the next 100 days or so, at least 500,000 and possibly as many as 1 million Tutsis and more moderate Hutus would die at the hands of extremist Hutu mobs and militias, gunned down or, more often, hacked to death with machetes. It was immediate, graphic, wholesale slaughter on an unimaginable scale and, inevitably, it transformed the lives of all who lived through it.

In Dorcy Rugamba's case, it has turned a modest, soft-spoken, 24-year-old pharmacy student and part-time dancer in his father's troupe into an internationally acclaimed theatre director. Next week, he brings his production of Peter Weiss's The Investigation - perhaps the most powerful play yet written about an earlier, even deadlier Holocaust - to London for its (and his) British premiere.

Performed by a Rwandan and Congolese cast, The Investigation - a documentary drama based on transcripts of the 1963-65 Frankfurt trials, which saw 22 German defendants tried under German law for their actions at Auschwitz - has already played to impressive reviews in Rwanda, in Belgium, and at Peter Brook's Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris.

"In many ways, it's exactly the right piece for us now," says Rugamba. "It's a play about two versions of history: the victims' and the executioners'. The Frankfurt trials were the first time that Germans confronted and judged Germans in the aftermath of a national trauma; Rwanda is now deep in the same process with our Gacaca village tribunals. Across the country, juries elected by the people are pitting those two versions of history against one another: the eyewitnesses versus the accused."

The fact that Weiss's play is not directly concerned with Rwanda's genocide makes it even more powerful, Rugamba believes, especially for a Rwandan audience. "It doesn't talk about our story, the Hutu-Tutsi story," he says. "It's a step removed from that whole context; it takes the real hard issues out of all the confused and confusing stuff that surrounds them. The Investigation takes a long hard look at another genocide and asks: what exactly was going on here? So, watching as a Rwandan, it doesn't matter if you're the son of a killer or of a victim, because this play doesn't say: I accuse my neighbour's father. The values are more universal."

Back to 1994. Two days after his family's massacre, Rugamba and his aunt and cousins fled into the still-peaceful countryside. As the violence and bloodshed spread south towards Butare, they slipped over the border into Burundi. There the French consulate was, he says, "extremely helpful", and concerned French friends of the family - people they had met during the dance troupe's regular seasons in Paris - sent the money for airfares and stood guarantee for visas.

"For a long time, we were ignorant of the sheer scale of what had happened," says Rugamba. "For more than a year afterwards, I was in a kind of limbo; I had completely lost my bearings. I stayed only a few months in Paris before going to Belgium to finish my studies [the Rwandan education system was based on that of the former colonial power], but I didn't really know where I was or what I was doing. I simply could not count the number of friends, acquaintances, family members I had lost."

Chance encounters with other Rwandan refugees and a growing desire to get to grips with his experience - "just to tell the story, I suppose" - led him, after graduation, to the drama department of the Liège conservatory of music, in Belgium. "I rediscovered a whole world, the world I had known since early childhood," says Rugamba. "In Rwanda, I grew up quite literally in a performing arts company. I was on stage long before I was in primary school. For me, entering the conservatory was like finding another family."

The result, in 1999, was Rwanda 94, an extraordinary, emotionally exhausting six-hour creation about his country's 100 days of madness that Rugamba co-authored and in which he played a range of parts. Premiered at the Avignon festival in France, the play and its 40-strong cast were showered with awards, and the production toured extensively for the next four years in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Canada and the Caribbean. "It rebuilt me," says Rugamba. In 2004, a decade after the genocide, the troupe took Rwanda 94 home.

"It was an extraordinary thing," says Rugamba. "For genocide survivors, it was something far, far stronger than theatre. Everywhere we performed, people - especially women, who had undergone unimaginable tortures - were howling, passing out where they sat. The authorities had to station ambulances outside each venue to carry them away. Rwandans have trouble expressing their emotions, you see. They don't like the raw and the crude, and this play was both. It was very real. It was like bursting a boil."

Between Rwanda 94 and Rugamba's latest production came a handful of other projects, including a formative spell with Peter Brook acting in the director's acclaimed Tierno Bokar, based on the life of the African sage and mystic. "That taught me such a lot," says Rugamba. "He manages to see things so simply, Brook. Above all, he doesn't have this tortured relationship with drama, where it has to be about suffering. It took Brook to teach me that the theatre can also be about pleasure."

So, 13 years after that April morning in 1994, how does Rugamba feel about what happened? "I am ... pacified," he says, searching for the word. "But I'm pacified because I'm doing something. I may not be a judge or a politician or a soldier, but I am doing something in the aftermath of this. I'm battling with that whole period. I haven't abdicated. So I'm not bitter about it. It hasn't sullied me. I do not hate life."

He still does not really understand the magnitude of what happened, though: "No matter how hard you work on it, there remains an element of mystery in every human being. It wasn't just killing, you see - it was killing with a sadism, a cruelty you simply cannot credit. And these were people of my age, some of them people I knew well. They were the ones who did it. That's something I'm still struggling to understand. It frightens me."

For the future of his country, he is "more optimistic than not. What happened was just so terrible that everyone knows it can't ever be allowed to happen again. It will need a lot of hard work. There needs to be a great deal of education, a healthy economy, plenty of jobs.

"And you just have to trust that the killers will not raise their children in hate, and that those children will succeed in inventing their own future, and not follow in their fathers' ways. Because people are not predestined to be bad, you know. You have to believe that or you'd be lost."

The Investigation opens at the Young Vic, London, tonight and runs until November 10. Box office: 020-7922 2922