De Morgen 

18 Feb 2005

Theatre has been hot news over the last week, and we were glad about that. Unfortunately this had nothing to do with the artistic creation, but rather with the injunction Maggie Strobbe took out against the play Aalst, by the Victoria theatre company.

It is based on the trial subsequent to the child murders in Aalst in 1999. Strobbe and her husband Luc De Winne murdered their two children. This mother, now serving life imprisonment, wanted to ban the performance of Aalst. According to her, Victoria was seeking sensation, would show her in a bad light and would make it more difficult for her ever to reintegrate into society. The play counters these accusations, and what is more, Aalst is, though grim, a very good play.

A criminal trial is like puppet-theatre: the judge’s hammer goes bang bang and the curtain rises. The accused are urged to bow their heads in repentance. The lawyers let them talk about their awful childhood, about abuse and evil chain reactions. Flashbacks through a sepia filter: they add class to any weekend film. This is based on a true story.

Aalst begins with adulterated oompapa music by Das Pop. In January 1999, Aalst, the onion town, was under the spell of the approaching carnival when, in a hotel room, two parents murdered their children. On stage, two actors are sitting in the dock. The voice . . . emerges from the speakers. He is the cross-examiner, the puppet-master. He is hard, cavilling, shows compassion, asks more questions, digs deeper, comes up against some nasty details along the way, and dramatises.

The director Pol Heyvaert based Aalst on newspaper articles and the report on the 2001 TV-programme Koppen. Seventy percent of the writing you see performed on stage is an exact copy of the trial. The writer Dimitri Verhulst made his own additions. Aalst is ‘faction’ theatre, a mixture of fact and fiction, docudrama onstage. . . What Aalst does show once again is that theatre can and should go beyond just putting stories on stage. If Maggie Strobbe feared being put in a bad light, we can only conclude that Victoria has added more realism to this horror story.

Aalst gives us a glimpse into the thoughts of two murderers, but also says something about us, the audience and jury. Anyone who heard the news on 11th January 1999 would have simply thought, ‘What monsters!’ That was the safe response. Victoria shows us that they are in fact human beings. Aalst is faction that compels us to look at our street instead of the television or newspaper. Universal and close to home.