Next Gen News

I remember him clearly. His mouth was cracked wide open in a guffaw; a tall, attractive young man, in his early 20s, leaning against a brick wall at the airport in Kigali, Rwanda. With chestnut eyes and skin as blue-black as a midnight sky, he could have been Rwanda's Next Top Model. But my eye was caught by the scar that sliced clear across his forehead like a crescent moon, and the stump of his left arm. He was a victim of the 1994 genocide; somehow he had survived. I tried not to stare, but here – or so it seemed to me – was the past, the present and the future of Rwanda.

So I was hesitant to bring up my idea for the story that became Children of Killers, the tale of three young men who are haunted by history's ghosts on the eve of their fathers' homecoming. Rwanda has been revisited many times in both fact and fiction, but few British plays have dwelt on its aftermath; I was worried that a play about the aftermath of genocide would be too challenging for young performers. But I asked anyway, and Anthony bristled in excitement.