Five Easy Pieces (2016) is a theatre production that the Swiss theatre and film director Milo Rau made with children for the Ghent arts centre CAMPO and that is based on the Dutroux affair.
The Dutroux affair as a starting point
As with other theatre productions by Milo Rau, testimonies and reconstructions of true facts form the basis of Five Easy Pieces. In this case they relate to the life and the crimes of Marc Dutroux, who kidnapped, raped and murdered with the help of some accomplices a series of children in the 90s in Belgium. Milo Rau says that he is always looking for the traumatic, tragic moments in the lives of both individuals and a country, because we are most affected and changed in those moments.
However, Milo Rau's intention was not to create an accurate representation of the Dutroux affair with Five Easy Pieces, but a modern tragedy with Dutroux as the starting point. His intention was to make "a children's theatre performance that was risky, unprecedented and virtually impossible." With the life and the crimes of Marc Dutroux as a starting point he searches in Five Easy Pieces for the limits of "what children know, feel and do", and explores what is acceptable and unacceptable for the spectators.
Underlying themes
The essence of Five Easy Pieces is not the horror of the Dutroux affair, but the big themes that lie behind this specific case. According to Milo Rau, these are "the decline of a country, the national paranoia, the mourning, and the anger that followed the crimes." It is not the killer and his psyche that interest him, but the history of Belgium and the collapse of Western colonial and industrial powers. In the Dutroux affair a number of important historical events concerning Belgium converge: from the loss of the Congo colony to the closure of the coal mines. In the theatre production Marc Dutroux functions as a kind of collective symbol for Belgium, as a black hole.
With Five Easy Pieces Milo Rau fictionalizes the Dutroux affair with the aim of telling something that exceeds the case. According to his own word, Marc Dutroux is a pretext for him to talk "about a government that does not function and about to what extent people have been disconnected from the political system." The Dutroux affair serves as an allegory about how we experience the world and think about it, and about how we deal with the emotional shock and pain caused by an extremely upsetting experience.
Metatheatre (Theatre about theatre) Milo Rau's Five Easy Pieces is also a reflection on theatre. The title Five Easy Pieces refers to a series of exercises that Igor Stravinsky composed in 1917 in order to teach children how to play the piano, and that were also called Five Easy Pieces. The theatre production of Milo Rau is made up of five monologues, each offering a different perspective on how children learn to act and how they learn to grow up. Milo Rau sees his performances as Lehrstücke, in the Brechtian tradition: his actors learn to play.
Every scene of Milo Rau's Five Easy Pieces starts with the projection of a short film in which adults start the scene. The children then take up live, act the scene simultaneously on the theatre stage, and continue playing while the only adult actor - in the role of director - films and encourages them. In this way the children play the role of the old and sick father of Dutroux, a police agent who discovers the murdered children, one of his victims and the parents of one of his other victims. What Milo Rau was interested in was to show the audience that a director, just like Marc Dutroux, is always a manipulator to a certain extent and that there exists a power game between him and his actors (especially if they are children).
Artistic team
Milo Rau is responsible for the concept, text and direction of Five Easy Pieces. The actors on stage are Rachel Dedain, Aimone De Zordo, Fons Dumont, Arno John Keys, Maurice Leerman, Pepijn Loobuyck, Willem Loobuyck, Blanche Ghyssaert, Polly Persyn, Lucia Redondo, Peter Seynaeve, Pepijn Siddiki, Elle Liza Tayou, Winne Vanacker, Hendrik Van Doorn and Eva Luna Van Hijfte. However, they form two different casts of seven children and one adult. Peter Seynaeve also takes on the role of directing assistant and performance coach. The actors in the film material are Sara De Bosschere, Pieter-Jan De Wyngaert, Johan Leysen, Peter Seynaeve, Jan Steen, Ans Van den Eede, Hendrik Van Doorn and Annabelle Van Nieuwenhuyse. Stefan Bläske is the dramatic advisor.