In search of the real Marilyn

Sally Day stars as the fraught Marilyn Monroe

Perhaps film fans who prefer a narrative of a star's life retailed by an actor on stage to reading the biography will enjoy this superficial revel in the world of suffering film stars.

A shallow stream of confessional selfconsciousness flows through Steve Black's Missing Marilyn, in which the celluloid sex symbol reveals quite a bit of herself - and her life - in a motel room to a handsome champagne-waiter.

Or is there something more to this man who functions solely as a prompt for Monroe's self-absorbed reminiscences?


The question of the waiter's identity, only hinted at in the play's last minute, offers the first flickers of dramatic life in Jonathan Hyde's stiffly organised production. Missing Marilyn is so busy bombarding us with the facts of Monroe's life that it fails to to put them into any arresting theatrical form.

Black sets his play a while before Monroe settled for life with Arthur Miller and well after she had added the super to her stardom. Sally Day's fraught Marilyn sprawls on a bed, dressed in pale mauve silk pyjamas. She is in flight from her whole damned life, with only pills, alcohol and neuroses for company.

Andrew Crabb's woodenly acted waiter, or stranger as the programme calls him, is invited to slip down Monroe's memory lane, from infancy to maturity. The familiar, wretched story of the star's early years is retold by the suitably voluptuous and emotionally fragile Day in a weird, mid-European accent.

The lack of a maternal or paternal presence, experience of fostering and sexual abuse, presumably do their damage. Black occasionally slips into the language of film star confession-cliché and offers few insights, beyond the obvious, to explain Monroe's profound emotional disarray.

Until 23 October. Information: 020 7226 1916.

Missing Marilyn

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