Based on real-life events that took place in the town of Aalst in 1999, the play recounts the murder of two children by their parents.
In January 1999, in the suburban Belgian town of Aalst, Luc de Winne and Maggie Strobbe checked into a hotel room with their two children, a boy aged seven and an infant girl of three months.
In 2005, Pol Heyvaert, a veteran stage designer who had a long-standing relationship with the Victoria theatre company, gave the story dramatic form.
Heyvaert and his co-writer Dimitri Verhulst drew extensively on original source material, including statements and interviews given by the accused, television footage of the trial and a documentary on the murder investigation.
The woman had been sexually abused by her father while the man had been raised in foster care and had become a petty criminal at an early age.
With its difficult subject-matter and frequently graphic detail, Aalst has been described as a 'disturbing' and 'complex' play, one that raises hard questions about individual morality and the welfare society.