Hate Radio is Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest for the Rwandan genocide. 

If you close your eyes and listen solely to the audio piped through the headphones that every audience member wears, you’re liable to believe that it’s a political rally. 

But Hate Radio’s visuals create The Zone of Interest’s dissonance. The fiery hatred of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines’ imagined broadcast is juxtaposed against the host’s disarmingly — and, alarmingly, given the content of their speeches — casual behavioral vibes. If you remove the headphones, the production looks more like a hangout play.

And that’s the insidious implication of Milo Rau’s show. The staged program is clad in the appropriated trappings of a countercultural pop style, albeit in service of propping up the hegemony of a brand of binary tribalism that counterculture sells itself as countering. 

Sound eerily familiar?

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Hate Radio does to “I Like To Move It” what A Clockwork Orange does to “Singin’ in the Rain” and what Reservoir Dogs does to “Stuck in the Middle With You.”

Which is to say: they relocate songs into a horrifying context, forever changing our associations with them.

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Placing the audience on both sides of the set for Hate Radio doesn’t merely increase the intimacy between the subject matter and us.

In a literal sense, we’re a divided group of people who see each other only through the fractured glass of RTLM.

And their words are thrown stones from a glass house.