REVIEWS: NATIONAL THEATRE OF SCOTLAND

26/3/07

© MARK FISHER published in Variety

Aalst

Tramway, Glasgow;400 Seats; £12 ($24) Top

A National Theater of Scotland, Victoria and Tramway presentation of a play in one act, adapted by Duncan McLean from original texts by Pol Heyvaert and Dimitri Verhulst. Directed by Heyvaert.

Cathy Delaney - Kate Dickie

Michael Delaney - David McKay

Voice - Gary Lewis

The recent popularity of verbatim theater coincides with a desire to get behind the headlines, to get closer to the truth of real events, to understand the mechanics of the public world. Rarely, however, has the form gotten so thoroughly and disturbingly under the skin of a subject as in "Aalst," first staged in Flemish by the provocative Belgian company Victoria and now remounted by helmer Pol Heyvaert in an unsettling production for the National Theater of Scotland.

Pieced together from interviews, TV footage and court material, the play is a response to a horrific double murder in the small Belgian town of the title. In 1999, Maggie Strobbe and her common-law husband Luc De Winne checked into a hotel in Aalst with their two young children. When they emerged some days later, the two little ones were dead.

"Aalst" is unremittingly bleak. If it gets the occasional chuckle, it's the laughter of nervousness and unease. There's no denying the actions of the parents -- renamed Cathy (Kate Dickie) and Michael (David McKay) Delaney in Duncan McLean's sharp, colloquial translation -- and there's no escaping the sad horror of the situation. At the end of a gripping and upsetting hour, applause seems somehow indecent. A few minutes' silent meditation might be more appropriate.

A first-date show this is not, but "Aalst" is an honest, honorable and revelatory attempt to come to terms with inexplicable actions. Exposing the two offenders like specimens under forensic examination, Heyvaert makes almost no concessions to the demands of theater.

He places the Delaneys under a bland wash of light, sitting them on office chairs in front of microphones, making them respond to the god-like voice of an unseen inquisitor (Gary Lewis). There is next to no movement, a set as uninteresting as any modern law court and only the ebb and flow of music to break the intensity.

The questioning returns over and over to the moment of the crimes, picking away with legal pedantry at the precise pattern of events. Yet the more we learn about the smothering of the baby and the stabbing of the 7-year-old, the more the parents' behavior seems to have had a logic. It's a warped logic -- the logic of damaged individuals, themselves the victims of gross neglect and abuse -- but a logic nonetheless.

The more we see of their world -- a place where domestic violence, uncontrollable rage and sexual abuse are commonplace -- the more we are forced to question our own assumptions of normality. The Delaneys are products of the society in which we live, and it's because of a failure of that society that their terrible desperate acts were possible.

Had Heyvaert presented the characters as monsters, he would only have confirmed the tabloid headlines. But the performances of Dickie ("Red Road") and McKay are quite the opposite. They are not evil, but vulnerable, heartbroken and perplexed, as if the enormity of their crimes is as much a mystery to them as to us.

With wide eyes and touching honesty, they are like children themselves, struggling not to deny the wickedness of the deed but to explain the circumstances that made it seem rational. "We wanted to wipe out our problems," says the father at the end of the play and it is with a sense of alarm that we can see what he's driving at.

Dickie and McKay deliver performances of towering, heartbreaking power in a production as compelling as it is unpleasant.

Set and costumes, Heyvaert; sound, Matthew Padden; production stage manager, Paul Claydon. Opened March 21, 2007. Reviewed March 23. Running time: 1 HOUR.

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