This play is based on actual events. A young couple, Luc de Winne and Maggie Strobbe checks in at a hotel with their two little children – a 7-year-old and a 3 month old daughter. A week passes, and the police discover something ghastly. In 1999, in the Belgian town Aalst, two parents killed their children in cold blood. The parents survived a suicide attempt and were sentenced to life in the subsequent dramatic trial which lead to much controversy in the Belgian media. The story is constructed like an interrogation; an incorporeal, authoritarian voice questions the couple about the events and what lead to them, whilst the couple tell us about their lives and their frightening doings. The play has been produced on several European, North American and Australian stages and festivals, and is known to be a complex, modern theatrical piece which raises troubling questions – questions that offer no easy answers. ”What unravels [...] is a brutal cycle of poverty, crime and abuse destined to repeat and repeat until it's beaten out of existence. Over an intense 70-minute interrogation [... the parents] are in turns edgy, remorseful, merciless, indifferent, self-deluding, pathetic and manipulative, their twisted logic a bewildering justification for their crime. [...] it is ugly, painful and deeply, at times unbearably, disturbing.” - The Herald * * * *
