Theatre

‘Every parent wants the best for their kids,’ says Michael Delaney in this documentary-drama. That this is a touching sentiment, despite Michael and his wife having murdered their two children, indicates the riveting moral complexity of Pol Heyvaert’s ‘Aalst’ – and the brilliance of Kate Dickie and David McKay’s performances. ‘Aalst’ is from Belgium via Scotland, whose new National Theatre adapts this work by the Victoria company of Ghent. Its script is assembled from statements given by a couple who, in a hotel in the suburban town of Aalst in 1999, suffocated their baby girl and stabbed their seven-year-old son to death.  

The achievement of the piece is that it doesn’t ask only Michael and Cathy to justify their action (why kill the children?), it demands that we justify our opposition to it (why not?). These parents wanted the best for their kids, but had no faith in themselves, or the world at large, to deliver anything but the worst. Their inquisitor makes appeals to social convention, but Michael and Cathy –  abused when young, raised unhappily in children’s homes, and now unable to tell love from hate, even in their own relationship – owe society nothing.

Watching the play is a sometimes gruesome, sometimes even funny experience. Michael and Cathy’s alienation has led to some curious foibles, like painting the lightbulbs black (‘If it gets too dark, we open the fridge’) and fretting about strangers’ germs on hotel pillows. Heyvaert’s masterstroke is to create a production in which the husband and wife themselves appear to be children. ‘Yes sir, no sir,’ they respond to the questioner’s paternal offstage voice. And with a child’s incontrovertible logic, they take responsibility only for their actions, not their consequences. As the killers, Dickie and McKay are heartbreakingly open but broken. ‘And who were the victims?’ asks the inquisitor. ‘The children,’ says Michael.

But which ones?