1 Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel (New York: Zone Books, 1999), p. 34Google Scholar.

2 Bauman, Zygmunt, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 20–1 (original emphasis)Google Scholar.

3 Pol Heyvaert, ‘Interview with the Director’, National Theatre of Scotland, http://www.nationaltheatreofscotland.co.uk/content/default.asp?page=s277 (accessed 2 March 2009).

4 Ibid.

5 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 34.

6 Aalst was conceived, directed and designed by Pol Heyvaert, who drew on factual material from the trial of Maggy Strobbe and Luc De Winne (transcripts and a documentary) for most of the script, with a small amount of additional material commissioned from Dimitri Verhulst. It was first performed by Victoria Theatre Company in Belgium in 2005 and subsequently translated into English by Duncan McLean and performed by the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS). McLean explains in the programme notes that ‘what Pol and I have tried to do for NTS is not to create a new version, but to recreate the original version in English. Nothing has been added . . . and we have also tried hard not to leave anything out’ (Programme Notes, 2008, p. 2). Aalst toured to Australia in 2008 and I attended a performance of the play at the Perth International Arts Festival.

7 In fact most of the lines spoken by the judge come from the trial transcripts, and, as Duncan McLean explains in the programme notes, ‘to a non-Belgian audience the latitude the judge has to interrogate and give his views on the couple in the dock might be surprising’ (Programme Notes, 2008, p. 2). This latitude is indeed surprising and the judge or ‘voice’ plays a powerful role in directing the flow of the narrative.

8 McLean, Duncan, Aalst (London: Methuen, 2007), p. 3Google Scholar.

9 Heyvaert, NTS interview.

10 Ibid. Duncan McLean states in the programme notes that during rehearsals for the Scottish production many questions emerged about the rights and responsibilities involved in making this work. He points out that they questioned ‘what right we had to make theatre out of the fragments of real lives, and of the real suffering of the children. How dared we write about these things and act them out, even sell tickets for the spectacle?’ (Programme Notes, 2008, p. 2). For McLean, Gary Lewis (who performs the role of the Judge/Inquisitor) provided a workable answer when he said, ‘maybe art has a responsibility to try and understand things we can't get at any other way – that's what it's for’ (Programme Notes, 2008, p. 2).

11 John McCallum, ‘A Dramatic Airing for the Horrors of the Courtroom’, The Australian, 21 January 2008, p. 7.

12 For more detailed discussions on witnessing see, for example, Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar; Rokem, Freddie, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000)Google Scholar; idem, and ‘Witnessing Woyzeck: Theatricality and the Empowerment of the Spectator’, SubStance, 31, 2–3 (2002), pp. 167–83; and Julie Salverson, ‘Transgressive Storytelling or an Aesthetic of Injury: Performance, Pedagogy and Ethics’, Theatre Research in Canada, 20, 1, available at http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/TRIC/bin/get6.cgi?directory=vol20_1/&filename=Salverson.htm (1999) (accessed 12 March 2008).

13 James Waites, ‘Aalst: National Theatre of Scotland’, available at http://www.australianstage.com.au/reviews/sydney-festival/aalst–national-theatre-of-scotland-1042.html (accessed 3 March 2009).

14 Maggy Strobbe, via her lawyer, Van den Eynde, attempted to prevent the first production of Aalst from going ahead. As Wouter Hilliaert points out in De Morgen, ‘As far as Van den Eynde is concerned the problem is not with the actual performance, but with the fact that it is neither an objective rendition of the story nor total fictionalization’. Strobbe drew on a Belgian law that states that everybody has the right to be forgotten. According to Liv Laveyne in De Morgen, Strobbe felt that ‘Victoria was seeking sensation [and] would show her in a bad light and would make it more difficult for her ever to reintegrate into society’. Pol Heyvaert explains that this position is problematic on at least two fronts: firstly, Strobbe allowed detailed documentation (video) of her trial and this would suggest that she did not fear the recording and dissemination of the story; secondly, by taking the theatre company to court she drew much more attention to the production than it would otherwise have attracted (see Heyvaert, NTS interview). The intervention of the ‘real’ mother further complicates the issue of witnessing as it adds another layer of questioning to the positioning of spectators as witnesses, who participate in the story and in its implications. See Liv Laveyne, ‘Review of Aalst in De Morgen’, 18 February 2005, at www.nationalthaetrescotland.com/content/default.asp; and Wouter Hilliaert, ‘Victoria Theatre Company Reacts to Lawsuit’, De Morgen, 8 February 2005, available at www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/content/default.asp (accessed 2 August, 2008).

15 Bryoni Trezise, ‘a quiet kind of terror: bryoni trezise is witness to aalst’, RealTime, 83 (February–March 2008), 13.

16 McLean, Aalst, p. 47 (original emphasis).

17 Ibid.

18 These comments emerged from discussions about the performance with other spectators, including Josephine Wilson, Hans-Willem van Hall and Bryoni Trezise.

19 Stuart Young, ‘Playing with Documentary Theatre: Aalst and Taking Care of Baby’, NTQ, 25, 1 (February 2009), pp. 72–87, here p. 80.

20 Mark Brown, ‘Staccato Descent into Murder’, Daily Telegraph, 29 March 2007, p. 29.

21 Waites, ‘Aalst: National Theatre of Scotland’.

22 McLean, Aalst, p. 17.

23 Ibid., p. 12.

24 Ibid., p. 28.

25 Ibid., p. 46.

26 Ibid., p. 13.

27 Ibid., p. 28.

28 Ibid., p. 28.

29 Grehan, Helena, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 This was made abundantly clear when author Anne Enright wrote a piece in the London Review of Books ‘Diary’ (4 October 2007) about the parents of abducted British girl Madeline McCann. The piece, which explored the ways in which we judge, categorize and position people (in the media spotlight), is ambivalent about the McCanns but it makes interesting and carefully self-reflexive forays into their story as it is presented in the media, in an attempt not only to understand (or make sense of) what happened but also to think about parenting more broadly. The piece received resounding criticism from the Irish and British press and Enright was accused of making an ‘astonishing attack’ on the McCanns. What Enright was expressing, in my view, was ambivalence, and the complex and contingent nature of judgment in the contemporary media-saturated environment. See www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n19/print/enrio1_.html (accessed 5 August 2008).

31 See, for example, Claire Allfree, ‘Inside a Pair of Evil Minds’, Metro, 20 April 2007; and Rob Saunders, ‘Aalst – Traverse Theatre, 19 May 2007’, available at http://einekleinenichtmusik.blogspot.com/2007/05/aalst-traverse-theatre-19-may-2007.html (accessed 28 April 2008).

32 Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1964), p. 93Google Scholar.

33 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 5Google Scholar.

34 But as Bauman, drawing on Levinas, makes clear, a lack of geographical (or other) proximity does not negate our responsibility for the other. See Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 85–92.

35 Bilsky, Leora Y., ‘When Actor and Spectator Meet in the Courtroom’, in Beiner, Ronald and Nedelsky, Jennifer, eds., Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), pp. 257–86Google Scholar, here p. 267 (my emphasis).

36 Arendt, Hannah, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture’, Social Research, 50th anniversary issue (Spring/Summer 1984), p. 8Google Scholar.

37 McLean, Aalst, pp. 26–7.

38 Vetlesen, Arne Johan, Perception, Empathy, and Judgment: An Inquiry into the Preconditions of Moral Performance (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 122Google Scholar.

39 McLean, Aalst, pp. 32–3.

40 Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, p. 87.

41 Vetlesen, Arne Johan, Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 11 (original emphasis)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Vetlesen, Perception, Empathy, and Judgment, p. 205.

43 Perhaps the slippage is a device that opens the work to the ‘realm of the sensible’, that allows ‘the saying’ to emerge briefly before being covered over by ‘the said’. For more information on this see Levinas's Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998).