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When the American
playwright Lynn Nottage travelled to Uganda in 2004 to interview
Congolese women fleeing the conflict in their country, they literally
formed queues to speak to her.

Nottage, who once
worked as a press officer at Amnesty International, wanted to write a
play about how the violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo had
affected women. Frustrated by the lack of media coverage of a conflict
that has killed an estimated 5 million people since 1998, she decided
to embark on her own fact-finding mission.

During her ten days
in Uganda – she subsequently made two more trips to the region in 2005
and 2006 – Nottage spoke to numerous women and heard stories that she
found devastating.

“In every instance,
there were more women who wanted to tell their stories than I could
hear,” she recalls. “I have pictures in one refugee camp where you can
see me literally surrounded by 50 to 100 people, people just lined up
to tell their stories.”

Some of those
stories are at the heart of her play Ruined, which received the 2009
Pulitzer Prize for Drama during its run in New York last year and is
now showing at the Almeida Theatre in London.

Ruined is a play
about the women and girls who have been victims of some of the worst
atrocities committed by armed groups fighting over Congo’s mineral
resources – women who have been raped, mutilated and left with injuries
so horrific that they are no longer able to bear children. Many of them
are abandoned by their husbands and ostracised by their communities,
their lives as well as their bodies ‘ruined.’

Deadly war

According to the
International Rescue Committee and other aid groups, the war in Congo
is the deadliest since World War II. Although the conflict officially
ended in December 2002, the IRC estimates that up to 500,000 Congolese
have continued to die every year, mostly from hunger and preventable
diseases.

The IRC, which has
helped thousands of rape victims in Congo, describes the violence
against women as a “combat strategy systematically used to terrorise
and humiliate,” rather than a by-product of the fighting. Although
Congo is home to the largest UN peacekeeping mission, MONUC, the
attacks on women persist, especially in the North and South Kivu
provinces in the eastern part of the country. In South Kivu alone, one
woman is raped every two hours, according to the UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Although Nottage
acknowledges that her play’s subject matter is dark, she says she
wanted to show that there are individuals behind the dreadful
statistics, “people who are three-dimensional human beings.” Her four
years at Amnesty International, where one of her jobs was maintaining a
photo file that included images of Iraqi poison gas victims, had made
her realise how easy it is to become hardened to stories of suffering.

“I would have to go
through these files, but at the same time you build up resistance and
you’re not thinking of these individuals anymore,” she says.

Although Ruined is
set in Congo, Nottage was advised against going there because it was
too dangerous, so she decided to visit refugee camps in neighbouring
Uganda instead.

“I’m not an
adventure seeker. I’m a mum,” says Nottage, who is 45 and lives in
Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two young children.

She also had to
abandon her initial plans to do a modern adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s
anti-war play Mother Courage and Her Children, one of the few plays
about women caught up in armed conflict.

A woman’s story

“I very much wanted
to tell the story of war, but specifically from a woman’s point of
view,” says Nottage. “Initially, my impulse was to use Mother Courage
as a template. Mother Courage is such an iconic, strong representation
of a woman who was pulling herself through this intractable situation
and somehow managed to survive.”

But after
interviewing the Congolese women, she realised that Brecht’s work,
written in 1939, did not address their experiences of war.

“I found that that
play neglected to address one of the aspects of war, which is rape, and
most women who find themselves trapped in those situations have been
raped. Mother Courage never addresses gender-specific human rights
abuses and what happens to a woman’s body and what women have to do to
protect themselves.”

Nottage says that
as a woman, she wanted the audience to become emotionally involved in
the subject matter, in contrast to Brecht’s approach, which was to
engage his audience intellectually.

“If I’m emotionally
drawn in, I engage with that subject better and feel much more
compelled to act,” says Nottage. “I think that if you give intellectual
distance people can rationalise why they choose not to take steps, but
once you get someone emotionally engaged we know what happens. People
can move mountains.”

Critical acclaim

Judging by the
accolades and awards Ruined has garnered, it appears Nottage’s
instincts were correct. Besides the Pulitzer, the play has won seven
other Best Play awards, including the New York Drama Critics’ Circle
Award. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay,
and several officials from MONUC saw the play in New York, as did the
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. Nottage says the Secretary General
was so impressed that he came to speak to her and the cast for half an
hour afterwards.

“I ended up going back and speaking with him at the UN,” she says. “He was that moved.”

Nottage was also
invited to speak at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos but had
to decline due to time constraints. But perhaps the most telling
tribute was from an expat who had worked in Congo for 10 years. After
seeing the play, he told Nottage: “I hear this information all the
time. This is the first time that I’ve shed tears.”

It is reactions such as these that have reinforced Nottage’s belief in the power of theatre.

“Something that
theatre does is we can force people to emotionally engage and to think
of the characters in three dimensions,” she says. “I still believe that
an army of theatre artists in a country can do more than an army of
soldiers.”

Ruined plays at the Almeida Theatre in London until June 5.