That it’s also a fiction is less interesting than its almost pornographic intensity. To get the scene he wants, Mr. Van Doorn’s character not only coaches the young actress, Blanche Ghyssaert, into a performance of immense pathos but also forcibly undresses her, pulling off her pants so as to make her seem more vulnerable. Is she not vulnerable enough?
And though she is apparently willing to comply for her art, we cannot help but register discomfort as Mr. Dutroux’s crime is echoed in the power imbalance between the adult and the child.
Or indeed in the imbalance between director and audience. That imbalance is part of the bargain of contemporary theater, of course: never more so than in works of the European avant-garde. In notes on the production, Mr. Rau makes “Five Easy Pieces” sound almost like a pastry, with so many layers of intention folded into a mille-feuille that it cannot be unpacked.
One layer is political: the shameful history of Belgium as the colonizer of Congo, where Mr. Dutroux lived until he was 4. That shame, we are told, is somehow echoed in the murder investigation, so bungled it may have led to unnecessary deaths.
I’m glad I read about that because it wasn’t evident in the production itself, even though the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba appears briefly. “Five Easy Pieces” seems only as political as a person who wears a small Time’s Up pin on a large coat.
Its real subject, or at any rate the most trenchant theme to emerge from behind its abstractions and intangibles, is the one suggested by the title, borrowed from Stravinsky’s book of études for young pianists. It is the performative nature of childhood, sometimes a source of great joy and solace — watch the young actors turn even death into a cheery theater game — yet so often exploited to serve adult concerns.
In that, “Five Easy Pieces” is remarkably successful, filled with stunning moments that pull you up short. When Fons Dumont, the boy playing the father of one of the dead girls, is unable to cry, Mr. Van Doorn first badgers him and then hands him a “tear stick” — a lipstick-like applicator of menthol and camphor. Voilà: a perfectly overflowing little bead of despair, glinting in blown-up video glory.
Mr. Rau is smart enough to let the play itself participate in the problem of how we use children for our own pleasure. But he does leave me wondering whether the atrocities used as a mere starting point here should really be open to aestheticization. Perhaps the victimized girls are worth more than that one gorgeous tear?
