Aalst, now on at the Soho Theatre peers into the minds of two child killers and through their eyes is refracted a very bleak view of society. In the late 1990s a young couple booked in to a dingy hotel in the Belgium suburban town of Aalst, and murdered their two children. Working from statements and interviews, TV footage of the trial and a documentary on the murder investigation, the production is based on this high profile trial that turned Belgium’s stomach.

The orginal production by Pol Heyvaert has been reinterepreted by Duncan Mclean for the National Theatre of Scotland and Aalst instantaneously becomes any sink estate or run down region of the UK.

Katie Dickie plays the catatonic mother and David McKay is the father. Both are interrogated by the penetrating Scot’s burr of Gary Lewis. Each has been abused and spent time in Care, they meet and start a family and then get heavily into debt, cadging benefits from the state and living hand to mouth. They are disaffected and disengaged from society. They only wanted the best for their children and when they realized this was unachievable they chose to take their lives.

The staging is very simple. The pair sit, side by side on plastic chairs, behind microphones and are interrogated by a voice that may be a social worker’s, a judges or God’s. They attempt to explain their actions and what lead them to smother their baby and to stab their son.

The couple flesh out their biographies and their warped lives are laid open for examination. They come across as simple automatons, living lives with no potential and reacting against a society which rightly or wrongly they feel let down by. Their confessions are shot through with moments of black, black humour, like when they talk of the unsanitary state of hotel rooms and their quarrelsome next door neighbour, which makes them seem all the more human and their crimes all the more incomprehensible and disturbing.

But while they are parents they are also accomplices in this terrible act and it is impossible to comprehend how they can talk of a love they share and of missing and still loving the children they slaughtered.

However while the subject matter of Aalst, is harrowing and certainly puts the actors through their paces it left me restless instead of engaged and affected. In part because it is only in their fleeting private communiqués, their prison love letters and the final scene when they bat around cliches to provoke their judges empathy, that you glimpse something more sinister, something akin to image management, that shines light on to the macabre, devious mind at work behind such a hideous affront as filicide.

  share with:  Facebook | Digg | other sites