Belgium’s BRONKS theater company was the hit of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2016, with their compelling work about a shocking event in the Caucasus in 2004, when 1,200 schoolchildren and their parents were held hostage by a group of armed terrorists in the small town of Beslan.

The hostage situation lasted for three days and ended in utter chaos. In Us/Them, two characters look back on those three days, when the whole world was shocked that the very worst evil had chosen the very greatest good as their victims. They do so with almost scientific precision, attempting to grasp events that in their extreme complexity and horror were utterly beyond comprehension. Us/Them is not an account of these terrible events, but about the individual way that children cope with extreme situations, contrasting their views with those of adults. As a physical storytelling, it shows that for children, things that seem incomprehensible in adult eyes have their own logic.