**
Written by Torben Betts
Directed by Trevor Nunn
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| Gloria Obianyo and Janie Dee |
The premise behind Speculations - or to give the play its full title: Speculations On the Unexplained Deaths of Several American Icons - is strong. Torben Betts’s new play, uses the narrative of an exchange between investigative journalist Dorothy Kilgallen (Janie Dee) and her young babysitter Flo (Gloria Obianyo), to explore the suspicious deaths of Lee Harvey Oswald and Norma Jeane aka Marilyn Monroe.
Directed by Trevor Nunn, although the two-act drama hints at a potentially exciting story this unfortunately is never realised as Betts’s script becomes quickly mired in sensational and cliché-ridden melodrama. Dee’s leading role is assured but her character rarely gets beyond two-dimensionality. Obianyo by contrast - describing aspects of Flo’s painful journey through the racism of the 1960’s United States - gives a performance that’s beautifully weighted and at times, deeply moving.
As Kilgallen describes her research to Flo, the action shifts firstly to Norma Jeane’s Californian bungalow bedroom and thence to a Louisianan bar. The bedroom action sees a bitter exchange between Jeane (Natalie Dunne) and her lover Robert Kennedy (Jolyon Coy), the country’s Attorney General and brother of the President. While Dunne captures the movie star’s tragic pathos, her presence fails to convince as an effective lookalike. The image of Marilyn Monroe was to become one of the 20th-century’s defining icons and this role could have been far better cast. Coy’s performance is dire, his American accent frequently slipping into posh-boy English as he bumbles his way through being the evening’s most thinly sketched out villain.
Down in Louisiana, Ferdy Roberts delivers a gem of a turn as Carlos Marcelo, a crime-boss and avowed enemy of both JFK and his brother. As he engages Lee Harvey Oswald (Joseph Potter) to assassinate the President, Roberts’s speeches crackle with a wryly convincing menace.
Lee Newby’s imaginative set design sees three ingenious revolves transport the action from coast to coast. Once seen however, the impressive gimmickry of the whirling scenery becomes a repetitive predictability and, perhaps unintentionally, a reminder of the spinning visuals of the scene-changes in the Batman TV series of that era.
As Joe Gillis sings in Sunset Boulevard: “It’s fun to see how bad bad writing can be”.
Runs until 17th January 2027
Photo credit: Helen Maybanks
