Aalst

What is it about Belgium? Previously best known as the motorway between France and Holland, over recent years the country has acquired a gruesome infamy for horrific child murders. None more so than the 1999 double filicide in the suburban town of Aalst which is the eponymous subject of theatre-maker Pol Heyvaert's acclaimed play that gets its English-language premiere at The Tramway this month. In a sensational case that rocked the nation and prompted much soul searching in the media, a young couple checked into a hotel in the town during early January with their two small children. A week later the children were dead, murdered by their parents in a macabre New Year's resolution.

As the shocking details of the case emerged in the ensuing media furore, Heyvaert was moved to try to make sense of this apparently cold blooded atrocity with a docu-drama that weaves the bare facts with fictional insights of his own. He was granted privileged access to source material including statements and interviews, trial transcripts as well as media accounts. However, the reality he found when he began his research was very different to the comfortable assumptions about good and evil which were being made in the media.

"I was shocked by how things worked," says Heyvaert. "How a prosecutor or a judge would lead or suggest, fill in the blanks as it were. They didn't even try to defend them. After seeing the play I think you will form a different kind of judgement. People have told me that they are embarrassed at sympathising with them but what the play asks is that the audience look at them before the murders too. They were kind of losers maybe, bad parents perhaps but they weren't killers. Yes they were failures but society also failed them in a way."

The result is a powerful and stark piece of courtroom drama with a cast of just three, one of whom is only a disembodied voice. "It was interesting to see how the people really reacted in court," he continues. "It's not what you would expect. We had privileged access to trial transcripts without which we would never have ended up with the play we have now. Where an actor or dramatist might colour an account, with Aalst I think the play is authentic."

Interestingly, Heyvaert did not interview the subjects themselves during the writing process rather preferring to preserve the emotional detachment needed for his factional retelling. "It was a conscious decision not to meet them or contact them. I struggled with that but the first audience I was writing for was them, so that if one day I met them I could justify the play." Perhaps if he had, they might not have mounted a legal bid to have the play banned. But with novelist Duncan McLean's new English adaptation - specially commissioned by the National Theatre of Scotland - currently poised for a nationwide tour, including The Traverse in Edinburgh during May, we can all get a chance to see another side of Belgium - one that has disturbing relevance for us all.