Speculations at Marylebone Theatre: Cloth-eared Marilyn Monroe conspiracy play

To have one crappy conspiracy play about Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys in London in 2026 may be regarded as a misfortune. To have two looks like carelessness. But lo, hard on the heels of Who Killed Marilyn? in August (a record zero stars from me) comes this fractionally less meretricious talkathon by Torben Betts, directed by none other than Trevor Nunn. The man who ran the RSC and the National and helped shape the modern musical is now doing hack work in Marylebone. Hoary old theories about MM and JFK being rubbed out by the Mob - he for stymieing their activities, she for writing about it in her diaries – are rehashed in three clumsy, exposition-freighted conversations. The main one involves showbiz journalist and TV light entertainer turned investigative journalist Dorothy Kilgallen (the estimable Janie Dee, somehow embroiled in this rubbish alongside Nunn).It’s 1965 and young black woman Flo (Gloria Obianyo, retaining some dignity against the odds) seeks work babysitting Dorothy’s young son to help her mother care for her brother, who is suffering post-Vietnam PTSD. Entirely improbably, Dorothy promptly reels off the entire thesis of her new manuscript which unveils the shadow ties between the Kennedys, organised crime, Cuba, JFK’s supposed killer Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald’s own killer Jack Ruby, old uncle Tom Cobley and all. Increasingly pissed on vodka, Dorothy swings between publish-and-be-damned bravado and cringing terror. Especially once threatening phone calls escalate into a brick through her French doors. Flo, too, changes as the explanatory dynamics demand. One moment she’s a shining-eyed true believer in the ability of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr to make things better for “coloured folks”. The next she’s opining that all politicians are alike and damn them all. She urges Dorothy alternately to tell and hide the truth and sneakily listens to her recordings of Ruby though she’ll clearly be caught.Jolyon Coy, Natalie DunnHelen MaybanksThis strand of the narrative is wooden and awkward but it plays like Chekhov compared to the other two. The side walls of Dorothy’s apartment pivot to reveal a bed and a dressing table and hey presto, we are in Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom. The second of her two Kennedy lovers, Robert, is tearing up the place looking for the diaries where she detailed his plan to poison Fidel Castro’s beard. He strobes through fury, anguish and lust, one minute begging for a final shag, the next reminding her he has a wife, six children, is catholic and the Attorney General (in case she’s forgotten, the ditz). She monologues that she’s not really sex-bomb Marilyn but “Norma Jean Mortensen, the little lost girl nobody ever wanted”. He delivers what sounds like a campaign speech about change. Mercifully, a peroxide-wigged Natalie Dunne doesn’t attempt to impersonate Marilyn. The boyish Jolyon Coy sometimes seems to forget that RFK is American.Lee Newby’s set is a redeeming grace: a third revolve spins the rear wall and we’re in a nightclub. In front of a glowing wall of bottles, Carlos Marcello (Ferdy Roberts, giving boilerplate hoodlum) recruits frustrated communist Lee Harvey Oswald (Joseph Potter, meh) for a special job. “Are you actually asking me to help assassinate the President of the United States of America?” Oswald shouts at one point, in case anyone in Row J has fallen asleep.Betts includes all sorts of extraneous detail, from the destabilisation of Guatemala’s banana economy to the ballistic trajectories of the Dallas shooting. But mostly it’s just old rumours dressed up as new. Maybe the mob did kill Monroe and JFK (and Kilgallen, whose research was missing when her body was found after a supposed overdose, and then RFK and MLK). Who knows? Who cares? I’m not sure Betts or Nunn really do, otherwise they’d come up with something more considered and less cloth-eared. I saw this show the night before its opening but sincerely doubt that 24 more hours made it any better.