Eliot Giuralarocca

Went to see "Who Killed Marilyn?" at the Emerald Theatre last night. The show deserves a better venue, a tighter edit and a fairer hearing than it is getting. The staging is the production’s clearest success. Sharleen Cooper Cohen’s play, directed by Philip McKinley, moves through the last years of #MarilynMonroe’s life and the conspiracy theories around her death in 1962 with a clean, confident visual language. The white room, the bed, the ghost of the star narrating her own story. It looks deliberate rather than decorative, and the transitions between Hollywood, the marriages and the Kennedy/mafia web are handled with more care than the writing always earns. @PixieLott, as Marilyn, holds the centre really well. She has the look, the breathy presence and, in the longer passages with her psychiatrist, a stillness that the surrounding scenes rarely match. Those sessions are the best of the night. Eliot Giuralrocca’s Ralph Greenson is the one supporting performance that feels like a person rather than a function. He is attentive, slightly compromised, never cartoonish. Against the rest of the company he is a relief. The rest is the problem. The play is too long for what it has to say, and the cast is too large for the story it is telling. DiMaggio, Miller, the Kennedys, the gangsters and the FBI men arrive, deliver a briefing, and leave. Most of their dialogue is painfully inept, stereotyped, and written in clichés that leave the actors nowhere to go. Monroe is repeatedly defined by the men around her, which is exactly the trap the evening claims to be escaping. A ruthless cut, and a much smaller company, would do more for the piece than any amount of extra conspiracy. The venue does not help. The Emerald, on Victoria Embankment, is the wrong house for this. The seats are uncomfortable, the sightlines feel impersonal, and on the night I went there were far too many empties, with no serious attempt to fill them by upgrading. A half empty end on auditorium makes an already long evening feel abandoned. With audiences this thin, the show would sit better with more space around the action, even cabaret seating. Better still, move it. The Menier Chocolate Factory, The Other Palace or Soho Place would give it intimacy, a more sympathetic crowd and a chance to be judged as a play rather than as an under filled West End booking. That is the shame. There is a staging worth keeping, a lead who can carry it, and a psychiatrist scene that briefly suggests the more interesting show underneath. It is not getting the support, or the room, it needs.