Arnon Grunberg

Cerebral

Wasp

Jesse Green in NYT on "Five Easy Pieces":

'That is a question you may find yourself asking with a shiver as you arrive at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts to see “Five Easy Pieces,” which opened for a brief run there on Thursday. Seven children, age 11 to 15, sit artfully spaced across the stage, looking innocently at the audience as it prepares to watch them enact a story that makes Medea look like Maria von Trapp.

The story is that of Marc Dutroux, a Belgian pedophile who kidnapped, imprisoned and raped six girls in 1996; two he then buried alive, two starved to death in an underground chamber and two survived. Mr. Dutroux became such a national monster that, even before he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2004, more than a third of Belgians with the same surname applied to change it.

So why ask children who missed the original tell the tale now?

For Milo Rau, making his American stage directing debut, the perversity is the point. Commissioned to create a work of children’s theater, he set out to redefine what that genre could mean — and also, it seems, to live up to his reputation as “the world’s most controversial director.” After all, his company, which produced the Skirball engagement along with the Belgian arts center Campo, is called the International Institute of Political Murder.

That he redefines children’s theater, I’ll grant him. There are no puppets, folk songs or happy endings. But if there is controversy in “Five Easy Pieces,” it is, like everything else here, kept at a distance. With its weird calm, its surprising gentleness and its ingenious arsenal of theatrical deflections, it is such an aesthetic experience that it sometimes becomes an anesthetic one. And as thrilling as the writing and stagecraft are, once you finally get behind them I’m not sure you can approve of what’s at its core.'

Read the article here.

The interesting is thing here: because children are involved and the theme appears to be pedophilia (I would say that the play is as much about, what is acting, what is theater, as it is about Dutroux) the reviewer becomes unsure about his own moral position. Can we condone this?

The most controversial thing about this play is that albeit children are playing in it and the theme is also pedophilia there is not so much controversial about "Five Easy Pieces." Something Jesse Green sees, but somehow he thinks, Milo Rau, children, Dutroux, it has to be controversial.
Maybe that it touched me less than I'd expected, it was a rather cerebral experience, very interesting, but cerebral. One of the most touching moments was when a kid confessed to being fond of torturing wasps.

The more disturbing aspect of the Dutroux affaire isn't touched at all, or at best indirectly, the fact that he became after his conviction a kind of love magnet.

Here's the Daily Mail:

'Dutroux was jailed for life in 2004 over the kidnap and rape of six young teenage girls between June 1995 and August 1996, four of whom died following the ordeal.

He regularly gets large volumes of mail ranging from insults to marriage proposals to stuffed animals and even money – but has recently been receiving requests from a number of Belgian teenagers desperate to connect with the convicted murderer, according to local newspaper Le Soir.'

The monster as an endless source of fascination, that's how we can summarize the history of mankind.

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