Carly Wijs’ play for Brussels-based young people’s theatre company BRONKS is an account of the Beslan school siege of 2004, in which a group of armed terrorists held over 100 hostages for three days in a primary school in North Ossetia, before Russian security forces stormed the premises and over 300 hostages died. I choose my words carefully: it is an account of this atrocity, but it isn’t about it. What concerns Wijs is how children process events and information.

As adults, we reflexively respond to various elements of this chronicle with horror, pity, shock, grief and the like. Our reflexes, however, are to a large extent socially conditioned. Children look more neutrally at what is going on, and react as they would to anything else. Hence Wijs’ two child-narrators, played by Gytha Parmentier and Roman Van Houtven,  repeatedly elicit laughter with their innocent accounts or (to us) sidelong perspectives. We are told that the previous year’s opening-day-of-term events had been “a catastrophe” because one girl had fainted in the heat. When the terrorists take control of the school gymnasium, instead of following these events, the children launch into a detailed digression about various pupils’ fathers, whom they imagine rushing heroically to free them.

This simplicity, of course, becomes progressively more heart-rending to an audience. Parmentier and Van Houtven thread their way through a labyrinth of cords criss-crossing the stage space, representing the bomb trip-wires set up in the gym by the terrorists; the routine of changing possession of a dead man’s switch connected to one such bomb becomes a kind of physical game. As their tale continues, they correct each other about the number of hostages: it is always falling, never explained but chillingly understood by us. At the very end of the 60-minute piece, the girl narrator is overjoyed because television networks all over the world have shown her image... that of her dead body being carried out on a stretcher.

It makes a deep and moving comment about our reductive assumptions regarding childhood innocence. It is no wonder that the piece won a Fringe First in Edinburgh last summer; after its run at the National Theatre, it can be seen in March in Dunkerque and Luxembourg.

Written for the Financial Times.