Monsters of omission

A film and a play were reviewed on the Newsnight Review (regular arts programme on BBC2 on Fridays at 23:00) this week. The film looked to be a sensitive portrait of child abuse and children's homes, with a good child actor, Molly Windsor. The film director Samantha Morton, herself a victim of abuse and care homes, was interviewed for several minutes. All the names were there.

But when it came to the play Monsters, the Brits turned narcissistic. It was a safely British story, so suitable for viewing by monoglots. The subject was the James Bulger murder. This play has already been tackled on this blog by Harry here but it is tonight's reception I want to focus on.

Presenter Kirsty Wark may have briefly mentioned the name of the playwright Niklas Rådström at the start of the programme, but during the whole item and discussion of the Rådström play, the author was quietly left unmentioned, except by the valiant Kate Mosse, the Orange lady, who mumbled Rådström's surname at one point, saying he was revered or similar in his native Sweden. But no interview with this foreigner or his translator.

The programme went on to mention a book by Anne Michaels, whose name was dropped several times. And once they'd got onto Dan Brown, they were chattering away as if Niklas Rådström had never existed.

I reckon they were scared of having to pronounce a name with an "å" and an "ö". Too much for the average British brain, although most Brits can manage "nickel arse road strum".

And the translator of this play? Not a mention. The Guardian usually links up with the Newsnight Review. So things appearing in the Guardian Review, also appear in the Newsnight Review. I hope the Guardian is feeling European this month and we get the names of more foreigners who can write splashed across the pages of the Guardian Review. Such discoveries will inevitably seep through to the Newsnight Review.

Niklas Rådström

The Swedish poet, novelist and playwright Niklas Rådström has written a play about the abduction and murder of the Merseyside toddler James Bulger in 1993 by two ten-year-old boys. The English version, "Monsters", is having its UK premiere at the Arcola, London E8. In today's Guardian, the author is interviewed by Lyn Gardner.

How do you turn a crime like that into art without being accused of feeding off other people's pain and misery?

"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?... "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."

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Rådström insists he isn't trying to upset people: "The intention is always to create a space for dialogue ... In Scandinavia, audiences didn't want to leave, they wanted to talk, because the play had given them permission to think about what had happened, and why and what they might be able to do about it ..."

I met Rådström at a conference many years ago when his main claim to fame was being the son of Pär Rådström. Having outlived his father (who died at 38) by a good few years, he has now pulled off the Martin Amis trick of being more famous than his father ever was.

Harry