The Child-Killer: A Portrait of a Paedophile
The Zoo, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: LEBENStraum Theatre Company

Tom Ogg

Two actors dramatise a serial child killer's letters in a chilling and intense play. Potent and gut wrenching, the evils of the killer are spelt out, often in agonising detail. The letters were written by Bartsche a German paedophile who murdered children decades ago. But the subject matter, paedophilia, is now in the news more than it ever was.

There is no doubt that what he did was utterly horrific; he was a homosexual child killer, who strived for dominance, who took great pleasure in the sight of a helpless death. He decapitated some of his victims, gouging out genitals and eyes. His ultimate goal was to slowly torture his victims to death.

Many are perhaps understandingly repulsed by the whole subject. They cannot understand why anyone would want to dramatise such indescribable horrors. There are however good reasons for having this discussion. The press tend to label paedophiles as 'monsters', try to deny their humanity, as a way of dealing with the horrific nature of the crimes. Addressing this labelling of paedophiles is a good reason for staging such a production (I am sure there are many more), because such labelling needs to be debated in itself.

This production does not seek to glorify in the evils that Bartsche committed, rather it a process of humanisation. It is a mission of understanding. The production is an exploration of the man and his acts, most certainly not a justification. I think that if anything, an understanding and in depth consideration of the issues only deepens my revulsion of him, but I do understand him a little better. I can see some of his motives, some of the things that may have caused him to commit such crimes.

It is like the difference between knowing only the results of what the Nazis did, and having an contextualised understanding of it. I believe the latter is preferable.

This play is challenging. If you want to think and understand about a very difficult topic, then this is the show to go to.

Andrew Haydon

The script of this play is assembled from a judicious selection from the 250 letters written by the German child-murderer Jurgen Bart; convicted in 1962, at the age of twenty, of killing four young boys over the previous five years. Unfortunately this production is hampered by some very silly decisions taken by the director.

Firstly there are two actors, both playing the role of Bartsch. This is apparently to direct the audience's attention towards the dual nature of the killer's character. However while the director has enough sense to realise that having one actor playing a 'good' side and one a 'bad' side would simply be crass, she gets around this by having both actors playing both 'sides' of the man, thereby making a nonsense of having employed two actors in the first place.

Similarly while both the actors put in very watchable performances there is far too much of the staring eyed, sweaty-hand-rubbing school of acting psychotically.

The text of the play is notable for the non-sensational descriptions of these brutal killings. It is annoying, then, that the staging goes some way towards reintroducing an unwelcome note of melodrama into the proceedings.

There is a very good, timely production of this intelligent, fascinating play waiting to happen; unfortunately this isn't it. While this version doesn't get completely between the text and its meaning, it is a shame that the marriage between performance and script has been so badly conducted.

4 August to 25 August.

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