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Aalst
A programme text produced with the National Theatre of Scotland to coincide with the UK tour, Aalst is a powerful and disturbing drama about two parents who murder their children.
The play is based on real events from the Belgian town of Aalst in 1999 where the ensuing high profile and dramatic trial led to much soul-searching in the Belgian media.
A young couple check into a hotel with their two small children. A week passes before the police make a chilling discovery.
In 2005 Belgian theatre company, Victoria, dramatised the case, working from source material including statements and interviews, TV footage of the trial and a documentary on the murder investigation.
Produced in theatres and festivals across Europe, Aalst has built a reputation as a powerful and complex piece of modern theatre which raises disturbing questions that have no easy answer.
The play is based on real events from the Belgian town of Aalst in 1999 where the ensuing high profile and dramatic trial led to much soul-searching in the Belgian media.
A young couple check into a hotel with their two small children. A week passes before the police make a chilling discovery.
In 2005 Belgian theatre company, Victoria, dramatised the case, working from source material including statements and interviews, TV footage of the trial and a documentary on the murder investigation.
Produced in theatres and festivals across Europe, Aalst has built a reputation as a powerful and complex piece of modern theatre which raises disturbing questions that have no easy answer.
64 pages, Paperback
First published March 21, 2007
11 people want to read
About the author
Duncan McLean
33 books13 followersDuncan McLean (b. 1964) is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright, and editor. His debut, Bucket of Tongues won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1993.
McLean has lived in Orkney since 1992. While based in Edinburgh in the 1980s, he started writing songs, stand-up routines, and plays for the Merry Mac Fun Co, a street theatre and comedy act with agitprop tendencies. The Merry Macs won various awards, and were twice nominated for the Perrier Comedy Award.
In the 1990s, McLean was part of a loose grouping of writers centred on Edinburgh whose characters were mainly poor, working class and young, whose themes were drugs, drink, dance music, violence, and alienation, and who took their inspiration variously from the Glaswegian writers of the previous generation, notably James Kelman, and from overseas writers like Richard Brautigan and Knut Hamsun.
In December 1990, with the writer James Meek, McLean set up and ran the Clocktower Press, a small but influential publishing house, which helped bring a new generation of Scottish writers to wider attention. McLean, Meek and the artist Eddie Farrell invested £50 each to print the first booklet, Safe/Lurch, with both writers contributing a story and Farrell illustrating the cover. After the first three booklets, Meek moved to Kiev and McLean went on to publish seven more, including the first separately-published extracts of what would later become Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. The fifth of the Clocktower series, it was printed in April 1992 in an edition of 300 under the title Past Tense: four stories from a novel.
In 1992, McLean published his first book, a collection of short stories called Bucket of Tongues, and since then has published several more books, including the acclaimed coming-of-age novel Blackden and a collection of plays, entitled Plays:One. In 1995, he published the novel Bunker Man and in 1998 his travelogue Lone Star Swing was published, which saw McLean tracing the roots of country music precursor Bob Wills.
McLean has lived in Orkney since 1992. While based in Edinburgh in the 1980s, he started writing songs, stand-up routines, and plays for the Merry Mac Fun Co, a street theatre and comedy act with agitprop tendencies. The Merry Macs won various awards, and were twice nominated for the Perrier Comedy Award.
In the 1990s, McLean was part of a loose grouping of writers centred on Edinburgh whose characters were mainly poor, working class and young, whose themes were drugs, drink, dance music, violence, and alienation, and who took their inspiration variously from the Glaswegian writers of the previous generation, notably James Kelman, and from overseas writers like Richard Brautigan and Knut Hamsun.
In December 1990, with the writer James Meek, McLean set up and ran the Clocktower Press, a small but influential publishing house, which helped bring a new generation of Scottish writers to wider attention. McLean, Meek and the artist Eddie Farrell invested £50 each to print the first booklet, Safe/Lurch, with both writers contributing a story and Farrell illustrating the cover. After the first three booklets, Meek moved to Kiev and McLean went on to publish seven more, including the first separately-published extracts of what would later become Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. The fifth of the Clocktower series, it was printed in April 1992 in an edition of 300 under the title Past Tense: four stories from a novel.
In 1992, McLean published his first book, a collection of short stories called Bucket of Tongues, and since then has published several more books, including the acclaimed coming-of-age novel Blackden and a collection of plays, entitled Plays:One. In 1995, he published the novel Bunker Man and in 1998 his travelogue Lone Star Swing was published, which saw McLean tracing the roots of country music precursor Bob Wills.
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