Grim play makes China debut
Seven children and a director are at the rehearsals — the young actors slip effortlessly into their different roles: a police officer, a victim, the parents of a dead girl and the murderer’s father. The locations swap between the scene of a crime, a funeral ceremony or an everyday moment from the life of Victor Dutroux.
For those of a certain age, that surname might ring a bell, offering a clue as to the play’s subject matter.
Five Easy Pieces, by Swiss theater director Milo Rau and his International Institute of Political Murder, is the grim tale of Belgian child murderer and pedophile, Marc Dutroux, controversially performed with children between the ages of 8 and 14 — and listed as one of the 10 “most remarkable productions” at renowned Germanlanguage theater festival, Theatertreffen, in 2017.
The 100th performance of Five Easy Pieces will be shown in Beijing on Saturday, as part of the Theatertreffen in China 2018, with one more performance in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, on Thursday. The play was also shown in Tianjin on Tuesday.
Theatertreffen is an annual, two-week festival in Berlin that takes place in May and reflects the highest level of contemporary theater.
In 2015, Wu Promotion signed a five-year agreement with Thomas Oberender, director of the Berliner Festspiele, paving the way for the Berlin Theatertreffen to present shows in China from 2016 to 2020.
Each year, a jury of theater experts from China and Germany will select some productions from the 10 performances staged in Berlin to be presented in China.
This year, at the 3rd Theatertreffen in China, one of those will be Five Easy Pieces.
The play, based on testimonies and reconstructions of actual events, mercilessly breaks through the taboos of our age, as Rau uses the biography of Belgium’s most notorious criminal to sketch a brief history of the country and to reflect on the representation of human feelings on the stage.
Five Easy Pieces probes the limits of what children know, feel and do. Purely aesthetic and theatrical questions blend together with moral issues: How can children understand the real significance of narrative, empathy, loss, subjection, old age, disappointment or rebellion?
“It not only represents the criminal’s life experience through the children’s acting, but also shows the rebellious spirit of the children with their bravery, resistance and courage,” says Jeroen Versteele, dramaturge of the director of the Berliner Fest- spiele, at the kick-off event for the Theatertreffen in China.
“When the crime happened, I was 16 years old and I remember joining the parade to protest the criminal,” recalls Versteele, who was born in Leuven, Belgium, in 1980. “I think the play is as persuasive as it is direct and touching.”
Shirin Sojitrawalla, theater critic and juror at the Theatertreffen, says Five Easy Pieces was selected last year as an example of a work based on political elements.
The current Theatertreffen jury consists of seven theater critics, who watch around 400 productions a year and select the 10 most remarkable new productions after several rounds of voting and discussion.
“As a jury, we want to find the script that is relevant, whether is to politics, or a poem, or other topics,” says Sojitrawalla. “Five Easy Pieces is based on a murderer’s life, but also shows what good theater can do — a play can have many effects, and get the audience involved.”
Theatertreffen in China 2018, which started on June 30, runs through July 14. Besides the performance of Five Easy Pieces, performances of Three Sisters, Kill your Darlings! Streets of Berladelphia and Purgatory in Ingolstadt are being shown at Goethe-Institut China in Beijing.