Poetic despair

Waiting for Godot
Theatre Royal Haymarket

Monsters
Arcola

Godot may be punishingly dull for most of its length but the closing speeches rival anything in Shakespeare as expressions of poetic despair. After the lights dimmed, the cast took their bows and the two stars began performing a lengthy and overrehearsed passage of music-hall mime, the QED to the production’s theoretical proposition. This baroque and self-indulgent curtain-call — by far the fussiest I’ve ever seen — revealed something faintly disturbing about the production. The stars seemed to be suggesting that they outshone the roles they’d played and that the script was just a nuisance which had to be got through before they could give the audience what it really wanted — A-list larks from Hollywood royalty. This is a very un-Godot-like Godot. But the fact that existentialism’s most sublime literary vehicle has become a showboat for movie stars is a paradox Beckett is as likely to have enjoyed as deplored.

Monsters, at the Arcola, is a dispassionate and intelligent attempt to examine the murder of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993. Niklas Radstrom’s play works as both a drama and as a public meeting. The players sometimes adopt the unnerving tack of addressing the audience directly and asking what they expect to gain from a play about infanticide. One doesn’t learn much about the event itself. It remains a mystery how two pathetic, bullied little boys hatched a plan to ‘get a kid lost’ and, over several hours, allowed the scheme to evolve from meanness into murder. Radstrom is good at exposing the commercial motives of the tabloid papers, which gratuitously rebranded James as ‘Jamie’, a name his family had never used. But I wanted to hear more about the real source of the crime, the families of the ten-year-old killers. Like charity, murder begins at home.