Review: Monsters, Arcola Theatre

The surveillance footage is seared into our public consciousness: three uneven figures, hand in hand, walking in grainy stop-motion along an anonymous supermarket aisle. Sixteen years on, something lingers as if wounds have not fully healed, scabs have not yet scarred over. However, the murmuring stir that has greeted the British premiere of Niklas Rådström’s performance-text about the James Bulger case owes more to the lazy sensationalism of others than any of its own. Instead, Monsters is a sombre, sober dossier on the two year-old’s abduction and subsequent murder that offers neither diatribe nor explanation.

Played in an open space scattered with suspended televisions, playing nineties flashbacks and gritty CCTV style images, Monsters feels like a collection of loose pages ordered half-arbitrarily. While he repeatedly returns to police interviews with Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, which are read seemingly from genuine transcripts, Rådström interrupts any linearity with apparently fictionalised monologues and choruses expressing multiple standpoints, often contradictory or puzzled. Not only are we left interrogating the factual status of everything presented, we must also determine our own perspective on the case. Where with one hand it lays blame with the parents, it attacks those thirty-eight witnesses that failed to intervene with the other; then the children themselves or the goading media. Just as it laments our increasingly amoral society, it lists a series of similar incidents from the past four hundred years.

In fact, Rådström appears to corner us into a position where the only perspective possible is one of abstention. Humanity is capable of the unspeakable and, accordingly, the play of children will occasionally make manifest such destructive impulses. Far from being monsters, then, Venables and Thompson are entirely human. Though this smacks unstomachably of determinism, it doesn’t seek total absolution. Rather it spreads responsibility thinner across us all. However – and this is where Rådström’s attempt to pin some culpability on the audience for our own inaction falls down – that responsibility is for different actions. Venables and Thompson are responsible for torturing and killing the infant; those thirty-eight witnesses are individually responsible for their own inaction relative to their own perceptions; and we are responsible for our failure to intervene in a re-enactment, though this cannot – as Rådström implies – be the same responsibility of those thirty-eight. Nor, and herein rests Michael Billington’s refusal of implication, is that responsibility one that ought to weigh too heavily on our conscience, since no children were harmed in the making of Monsters.

Whatever reservations one may have about Rådström’s text, however, Christopher Haydon’s direction is superb, remaining unfaltering faithful and endowing the performance with enormous honesty and – in tandem with Jon Bauser’s clinically industrial design – a slick stylishness. Veering towards re-enactment and unfussy embodiment rather than full-blown representation, Haydon deftly avoids hijacking a personal tragedy, yet still manages to create an affecting and judder-inducing atmosphere.

Sedate but frank performances from an engaging foursome (Lucy Ellinson, Sandy Grierson, Jeremy Killick and Victoria Pratt) balance distance with empathy, finding the gentlest infusions of character without coming close to identification. It is as if the room is haunted by the case’s ghosts, lingering half-present above them.

Sadly, the text veers off-course on the final straight, almost as if Rådström was unable to leave out his favourite sections but also unable to quite place them. Nonetheless, Monsters is a gripping and disconcerting perspective on humanity’s tendency towards destructiveness. Since it stokes the emotions precisely by remaining emotionless, one cannot feel that it could benefit from a touch less over-thinking.