Ice & Fire presents

I Have Before Me A Remarkable Document Given To Me By A Young Lady From Rwanda

Available for overseas touring in 2005 - 2006

I Have Before Me... charts the bitter-sweet relationship between Juliette, a young Rwandan woman and Simon, a British poet as he tries to help her write out her personal story.

Humorous, touching and at times disturbing, the play was inspired by the real life experiences of young Rwandan refugees in the UK.

 “A remarkable achievement. This is a stirring tale of human bravery in the face of adversity.” Time Out (Critics Choice)

“Heartfelt and touching” The Guardian

“an important, timely piece of theatre that manages to explore political issues and express moral outrage without ever once lapsing into moralising and political rhetoric.” What’s On in London

Sonja Linden, Writer:
Shortly after I started working as a writer for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, I met Lea Chantal, a young woman from Rwanda, whose ‘impulse’ to write had started in a refugee camp shortly after the murder of her entire family. What started out as a testimonial act, the writing out of her family’s experience of genocide, became in addition an act of healing, as a result of which she reported that she felt ‘clean’ and that her nightmares and headaches had ceased. For two and a half years she had worked on this book on her own, writing in her mother tongue and wrestling day after day with her enormously painful story, often tearing up the previous day’s work at five o’clock in the morning, when she started her daily writing. Even while she was immersed in the process of writing her book, she recognised its therapeutic value, talking about writing in order to take the pain “away from my heart”.

The healing she achieved was done at enormous cost, since it meant confronting and expressing with full force the negative emotions that overwhelmed her in the years following the genocide. So inspired was I by her story, that when I came to write something of my own, as part of my writing residency, it was infused with her spirit and her struggle to write.

I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda tells the story of an uneasy relationship between Simon, a struggling British poet in his mid-forties and Juliette, a young survivor of the Rwandan genocide, who comes to him for help with her book. My challenge as a playwright was to transform this into a piece of theatre that would engage an audience. Humour, remarkably, became an important component, to create a sense of balance and draw the audience in. Humour largely drawn from the cultural divide between the Englishman and the young African woman. It is this aspect of the play, and its juxtaposition with a dark story, as well as Juliette’s plight and feistiness that audiences have most remarked upon.