Aalst Review
'Knowing is what we do to other people when they're not there', Adam Phillips reminds us. This statement hits particularly hard when 'other people' turn out to have murdered their own children. The thought of such crimes can turn stomachs even among those of us with no offspring of our own, while the red-topped press feed off our individual and collective prurience whenever any such case comes to light. 'Aalst' is based on a real-life double murder of their children by both parents, its unspoken question, the one we would all be likely to ask ourselves first, 'Why?'.
Kathy (Kate Dickie) and Michael Delaney (David McKay) are interrogated by a disembodied Voice (Gary Lewis) about their past lives and the events leading to the murders of their children. The Delaneys bleak backgrounds prove the stuff of social work reports; a depressing chronicle of inadequate social care leading almost inevitably into petty fraud and other crimes, state dependence and the black economy. The script appears to be based substantially on transcripts of proceedings, and the production puts Kathy and Michael back on trial, possibly to reduce the sentences they are already serving, although this is never made fully clear.
What is made clear is that any 'freedom' they might enjoy in future would be completely illusory - both of them being aware how life closed down their options long before they took their children's lives. The audience can all but smell the hopelessness of the equivalents of the Rapploch or Easterhouse in which Kathy and Michael exist. The problem remains that however true all of this undoubtedly is, reportage struggles hard to become drama. Dickie and Mckay however, turn in genuinely moving performances of skill and invention, propelled into confronting the horror they have perpetrated by Gary Lewis' relentless Voice.
It may or may not be true that it has become impossible to write tragedy after Auschwitz, yet the more irretrievably commodified our experience becomes, the less able we are to re-experience it as poetry. 'Medea', whether in English, Scots or French has more to say about the instability of our most deeply held beliefs about parenthood than a wheen of court reports, as well as the grace to understand how private our private lives must essentially remain. There feels something amiss in 'Aalst', appearing to collude in stripping away the reticence shame can induce, even as it condemns such prying. Kathy and Michael are too inarticulately 'other' for a largely middle class audience who (presumably) love their children and act responsibly. Their actions, reactions and guilt never quite become ours, no matter how understandable some of these is made.
Antigone, Medea and Hamlet permit an audience to dream unacceptably in public - to gloss the awful with responses to questions they would never otherwise dare ask themselves. Our inner worlds seem to have shrunk with the globe, and our ambitions equally diminished. 'Aalst' feels but a few tragic steps removed from 'Trainspotting' or 'Shameless', and if theatre is indeed reducing to holding mirrors up to our individual or collective misbehaviour, the reflection we need to see ought to be clearly and uncomfortably our own.
