Photo: NUX Photography
Writers: Vicki McKellar and Guy Masterson
Director: Guy Masterson
⭐️⭐️
According to Bernie Taupin’s song lyric, Marilyn Monroe “lived her life like a candle in the wind”. If this is so, the new drama co-written by Vicki McKellar and Guy Masterson investigates the intriguing question of what or who was the source of the gust that snuffed her out. She was found dead at her Los Angeles home, supposedly having taken an overdose of sleeping pills, on 4 August 1962 at the age of 36.
The play intercuts scenes from the final days of Marilyn’s life with scenes of gatherings of her friends and associates in the hours after her death. It is a structure that comes close to strangling the drama, leaving it with few places to go as the characters present the patchy evidence to the audience in excessive detail and the survivors conspire to conceal the truth which, they believe, points to wrong doings in very high places.
Genevieve Gaunt’s Marilyn is adept as an impersonation of the Hollywood icon, but there are only small traces of the tarnished innocence which her on-screen persona represented. We see a woman who is in full control of her sexual allure and is beginning to realise the power which she holds over the most powerful – her alleged lovers United States President John F (“Jack”) Kennedy and his brother, Robert (“Bobby”), the Attorney General.
Conspirator in chief is Peter Lawford (Declan Bennett) a B-list Hollywood actor more famous for being a member of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. Lawford’s wife Patricia (Natasha Colenso) is the sister of Jack and Bobby and his first imperative is to retrieve Marilyn’s diaries which it is believed not only name names, but contain details of very indiscreet pillow talk. His second imperative is to conceal the full truth about the circumstances of Marilyn’s death from the authorities and, most importantly, the press.
Director Guy Masterson’s production, on an open stage that occasionally revolves and is over-cluttered with furniture, sees seven characters arguing it out and trying to find a resolution. This resembles the denouement scene from a whodunnit, sprinkled with flashbacks to the victim herself. Stretched out to two-and-a-half hours, there is not enough wit in the script nor energy in the staging to sustain interest, while the “murder” method that is suggested is so bizarre that even Agatha Christie might have gasped in disbelief.
Little more than a year after the events depicted here, Jack too was dead, sparking a whole new round of never-proven conspiracy theories. For those who revel in such things, there is much in the play to mull over (an over), but, for the rest of us, this over-cooked melodrama has little to say and it takes far too long in saying it.
Performance date: 27 June 2024
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