The novels, plays, short stories and children's books of Marie NDiaye are littered with unwanted, hated, invaded children. Even in the enigmatic textual and photographic ‘self-portrait’, Autoportait en vert (2005), children, including the narrator's own ever-proliferating brood, wander, unsupervised and often vaguely feared by their caregivers, through peculiar stories and images of hostile, reluctant or merely ghostly parenting. The figure of the child as universal scapegoat has always been prominent in NDiaye's world: one thinks of the hapless Bébé in La Femme changée en bûche (1989), burned up by his mother in a coat specially commissioned from the Devil, or Fanny's little messenger-girl at the end of En famille (1990), scalded and maimed by the family who sees in her an emanation of the hated Fanny herself. In the second novel cycle, the child becomes more significant still, as all the protagonists begin, as NDiaye herself was doing, to reproduce. This group of texts heralds the arrival of NDiaye's most iconic infant victims: La Sorcière's Steve (1996) and Rosie Carpe's Titi (2001), both boys sacrificed on the altar of their mothers’ need to be free of the burden of parenting, even if this means abandoning the child to perish among rats and rotten guavas.

If the meat-loving adult son Ralph of Mon coeur a l’étroit (2007) signalled the dangerous possibility of a grown-up child's vengeance on his abuser, by the time of Trois femmes puissantes (2009) NDiaye had returned to portraits of children as utterly devoured by their parents, both Sony and Djibril (little boys again) reduced and defeated by their selfish, predatory or merely depressive ‘caregivers’. NDiaye's theatre, as we have just seen, takes the child into more frightening territory still.