The main focus of Marketplace 76, the new play by the Belgian Needcompany, is the question of crime and punishment and of justice and injustice in our relations with foreigners. In the premiere during the Ruhrtriennale, the company’s highly individual theatre idiom was much applauded. It starts with a mourning ceremony following a tragic accident in which 24 people lost their lives, including 7 children. How can a village community cope with such an event? Needcompany, headed by Jan Lauwers, has constructed a square acting area in the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum. In the middle is a rudimentary representation of a fountain. This marketplace is a sort of test set-up for an investigation into the concepts of community and society in the past and the present. Both Brecht and the Danish Dogme film-makers provided the model. The stage setting is directly reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s film Dogville. In that film, a stranger called Grace brings the evil in a village community to the surface. She is humiliated, raped and made into a slave. Marketplace 76 presents a variant of this same character. One year after the catastrophe that cost so many people their lives, the Korean Kim-Ho is an accessory to the abominable deeds of her paedophilic husband Alfred. For 76 days he keeps a girl imprisoned and abuses her. Jan Lauwers is thus here setting out the case of the criminal Belgian couple, Marc Dutroux and Michelle Martin. But his parable leads to a surprising result: after the village community, lapsing into primitive patterns of behaviour, first drowns and the hangs Alfred, his wife Kim-Ho brings about the reconciliation – by willingly offering herself as a whore to all the men of the village. In Marketplace 76, these instances of extreme cruelty, told to the very end in the finest detail, are combined with a childlike humour (gull droppings falling from the sky become a running gag), musical-style vocal numbers, and dance. Thanks to these elements, it turns into a successful updating of Brecht’s epic theatre, which is guaranteed to leave no one indifferent. This archaic village community is, surprisingly enough, a possible model for the globalised society; in this polyphonous theatre composition, the situation of illegal immigrants in Europe is also raised.