Guest Blog: John Rwothomach On FAR GONE at the Studio Theatre, Sheffield

Let me set the scene. You're a smaller-than-average, eight-year-old kid living in the city. Christmas comes around, and your parents decide to spend it with the grandparents in their village far away. What could be more exciting? Family, warmth, togetherness.

But then: a distant gunshot in the night. Followed by more. Coming from a neighbouring village. Screams accompany the gunshots, and this goes on for a while. Then they stop, and, slowly, those people who ran crawl back to their homes and survey how those gunshots have changed their lives.

If that scenario sounds like the beginning of a film, imagine living it for real. I'm the eight-year-old kid, and the events described happened in Northern Uganda - events that would be forever etched in my head.

Fast-forward a few years and across a few borders and I'm now experiencing a different kind of stress. Drama school. It's 2012 and I'm in my first year of acting training at Rose Bruford, living in the UK. A video is shared, flooding Facebook timelines, relentlessly spoken about in conversations and quite spectacularly capturing the attention of Western world. The video is entitled 'Kony 2012', and before you know it, the memories of that Christmas, the horrors inflicted on my country of birth, were there for everyone to see.

In the video, an American 'charity' looks to expose the evils of rebel group The Lord's Resistance Army, a group that would raid villages and capture children to serve as soldiers as they spread across East Africa. Invisible Children, the American charity, then led by Jason Russell, used the film to highlight atrocities that the infamous Joseph Kony, leader of the LRA was guilty of, and they compelled the world to act urgently and swiftly. I didn't disagree that Joseph Kony was a monster, but I watched bemused as everyone - without question - took these privileged Americans at their word.

To me and many other Ugandans it was frighteningly clear that the truth had been grossly manipulated, a smokescreen to disguise a true intention and agenda. After all, Joseph Kony had been around for 20 years before this group of white saviours reared their heads - where were they then?

As the little eight-year-old kid who narrowly avoided kidnapping, and now an adult with a pretty good understanding of what the LRA is and what they do, my bemusement turned to anger. And what does an artist do with anger? They take out their pen and paper - and so I did.

It started as a poem, and at the end of that poem a vow to tell the true story, the story that had stayed with me all these years, a story that would mourn the children taken that night, made into soulless disposable machines never to return to their families and homes, and for the few that did return, starved of childhood innocence, forever changed, forever broken. So when I set the scene, I try and imagine if one of those children had been me.

Six years later I turned the poem into a script. Its first staging was as part of the Making Room scheme at Sheffield Theatres in 2018. In summer 2019, the full play was performed at Theatre Deli Sheffield for three nights.

Then the homecoming. As part of the Kampala International Theatre Festival, we took the show to Uganda, where child soldiers, I was told, were part of the audience, a terrifying and yet humbling experience - perhaps nothing was more important than what these children, now adults, thought, the very people who I wanted to commemorate. The show spoke to them and reflected their experiences. It was a proud moment for me as I felt it validated the show. I went into the new year with huge confidence ahead of our much-anticipated tour starting in March 2020.

Yeah. We all know what happened. And now (finally), two years later, the show is back, with tweaks and changes but the same mission burning strong and now under my new theatre company, Roots Mbili Theatre. Far Gone will stand as the first in a line of shows committed to platforming underrepresented voices.

I was the eight-year-old kid lucky enough to escape, and so this story is for those who didn't - and a reminder for those who will never get close to going through it.

I end with an essential shout out to the Women's Advocacy Network, a small charity in Northern Uganda doing big things. We are donating programme proceeds to support their work rehabilitating ex-child soldiers, resettling families and helping people overcome trauma.

Far Gone is at the Studio Theatre, Sheffield, from 17-26 February and then on tour - book tickets at www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk

Photo credit: Smart Banda

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