Five Easy Pieces

Staging a play about the Belgian child murderer Marc Dutroux with children between the ages of 8 and 14, of all people? This reeks of scandal – and of an idea developed by Swiss director Milo Rau, who has been exploring the representability of evil for some time. In “Five Easy Pieces”, Rau duplicates the theatre situation by showing seven children and a director (Peter Seynaeve) at rehearsals. Scenes based on documentary material from the Dutroux case – interviews with the perpetrator’s father, but also with victims’ parents, a policeman’s report, a never-sent letter from a kidnapped girl to her parents – are increasingly superimposed by the question of how and whether children can play characters in this case at all. In his highly ambivalent production, which rigorously reflects on its own ethics, Milo Rau manages to set the self-confident individualities of the children from Ghent against evil, including the evil in art.

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