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Lucy Ellinson in Monsters |
The anatomy of a killing
MONSTERS
ArcolaTheatre
FROM the opening line through the 30 scenes making up Monsters, it is clear what kind of play this is not, namely a moralising one.
The job of theatre, to paraphrase the American novelist Philip Roth, is not to answer questions; it is enough to phrase them poetically.
Niklas Rådström, who wrote Monsters, clearly shares this view.
He is not one to pass judgment; he merely conveys information via actors to the audience, the jury, and lets us make our own minds up. These are the facts. In winter 1993 two 10-year-old children did not just kill, they killed a child.
And they did not just kill the child, they killed him in an extremely violent way.
The sober tone lapsed into by the actors in Monsters frequently achieves a cathartic effect of sorts, but it is hard to listen to the details of that violence without wishing to stop one’s ears.
And the worst of these details they spare us.
There are those who have branded such dramatisation unnecessary. One local paper suggested in an editorial that the very concept of the play was “vile”, running a front-page splash about the “outrage” it had sparked.
This turned out to be a case of people who had not seen the production criticising what they imagined it to be, something condemned by its director, Christopher Haydon, in an interview with this newspaper.
Rådström’s writing, for all its stone-like qualities, contains tenderness too. A man describes seeing, in an ultrasound scan, “a small throbbing grain of rice…a life coming into existence”.
The father of one of the murderers, meanwhile, gives evidence shielded by a TV screen – about as close as Monsters comes to moralistic finger-pointing.
The 38 people, “blind as the CCTV cameras”, who saw the two boys walking with their two-year-old victim (with the latter in varying stages of distress) but did nothing, are referred to in passing.
Can they be said to have been to some extent responsible for what happened to James Bulger on that February day in a poverty-stricken Liverpool district?
Monsters is a fascinating play that deals with an extremely upsetting subject in a largely sensitive way. It treats its audience as intelligent beings capable of reasoned judgment.
Which is more than can be said for much media coverage of terrible events and the plays they inspire.
Until May 30
020 7503 1646
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