Workshop 4: 'Monsters'

Workshop 4: Workshop 4 was ran by Abbie and saw us looking at the start of the play 'Monsters' written by Niklas Rådström, a Swedish lady. The play follows the horrific event in 1993when Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both 10, abducted two-year-old James Bulger from a Merseyside shopping centre, took him on a circuitous walk to a railway cutting and murdered him.
The play is performed by four adult actors who take multiple roles - as children, as parents, as investigators and as a chorus. With its emotive name and subject matter, Monsters might seem to be simply fuelling the tabloid hysteria that surrounds cases such as Bulger's death.
It immediately struck as a group as something we wanted to look further into, the retake of such a shocking event struck so many ideas in our head and we began to brainstorm idea's of we could remodel such a fantastic play and make it our own. We looked at the scene following the denial of 36 bystanders and began to action using "lanes" something we had looked at before in drama. It was interesting to see how such an abstract play revealed so much information and we set a homework to go away and research more thoroughly on the event.


"I thought long and hard," says Rådström. "I thought for five or six years. There is no new information in the play; everything is on public record. If the media can give it miles of column inches, why shouldn't theatre deal with it? But I was cautious: if you deal with such a thing, then you must do it responsibly - although I'm not sure the British courts or the tabloids dealt with it in a responsible way." He is referring to the fact that Venables and Thompson were tried in an adult court. "With every word I wrote, I tried to imagine how it might be if the parents of James Bulger, or the parents of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, were in the audience. Theatre is unique in the way that it brings artists and audiences together in a room and enables them to have a conversation."