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Five Easy Pieces: Play takes on case of Belgian murderer Marc Dutroux

SINGAPORE — In the run-up and aftermath of the staging of Swiss director Milo Rau’s and Ghent-based art centre CAMPO’s Five Easy Pieces, one might be forgiven for thinking that the most controversial aspect of this particular offering at the Singapore International Festival of the Arts was the last-minute M-18 rating that it received.

SINGAPORE — In the run-up and aftermath of the staging of Swiss director Milo Rau’s and Ghent-based art centre CAMPO’s Five Easy Pieces, one might be forgiven for thinking that the most controversial aspect of this particular offering at the Singapore International Festival of the Arts was the last-minute M-18 rating that it received.

To do so, however, underrates how deeply disturbing and profoundly unsettling the concept behind Rau’s devised production is.

The show, which ran from last Thursday to Saturday, opens with a casting director (played by Peter Seynaeve) having each of seven child actors introduce themselves to us in turn. We learn their names, their backgrounds, why they are interested in acting and what kinds of parts they are interested in playing. At this point, the vibe of the production is easy-going and innocent. Each child shows off distinct personalities and their individual talents — from singing John Lennon songs, to playing musical instruments, to dancing (rather badly) to Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1 (a song that was to haunt the rest of the production with its mournful, meditative tune).

It is only after a picture of Marc Dutroux, the infamous Belgian murderer and child rapist, is flashed on the large projection screen behind the children’s heads that the play begins to venture into uncharted and darker territory.

The five pieces in the play’s title refer to five scenes played by the children, who step into the roles of real people who had been involved in the Dutroux affair. They embody characters from Dutroux’s father to the policeman who investigated the case, to one of Dutroux’s victims and one of the victim’s parents.

In some scenes, the children imperfectly mimic the actions and emotions of adult actors whose performances have been filmed and projected on stage; in others, the children are the ones being filmed live and we consume their performances not as live performance but on film instead.

These scenes are not easy ones for children — who have little experience of life and of emotions such as grief or anger — to play. Contrary to what the children think, acting is not simply a kind of pretending and it is no simple matter to convincingly portray old age without copious amounts of make-up or convey the grief of having lost a child.

But they are not scenes that are easy for an audience to consume, either. A vague sense of unease that develops when the casting director innocently asks eight-year-old Rachel if she would kiss someone on stage and she responds, “Kiss you? No!” solidifies into a decided chill when the same girl is instructed, during her scene, to take off all her clothes — “just like (she) did in rehearsal”.

At that point, the realisation that we are watching something that daringly (but also dangerously) blurs the boundaries between direction and manipulation, performance and pornography, wish-fulfilment and exploitation, hits home. The chill only deepens when, during the play’s last credits, it is revealed that Seynaeve does not merely play the role of the casting director: He plays Marc Dutroux as well.

In short, Five Easy Pieces is one of the more quietly horrifying and disturbing plays Singapore may have seen in a long time.

I could not help but come away from it wondering how the children would one day make of their experience in this play — and how young Rachel would choose to reconcile herself with what she has had to do, night after night, to suit an audience’s appetite for a show like this.

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