Who Killed Marilyn? at the Emerald Theatre review: This inept non-exposé is my first ever zero-star review

It was the mob, on behalf of the Kennedy clan. There: now you don’t need to see this tawdry and irredeemably awful trawl through Marilyn Monroe ’s life and last moments, which rehashes various well-known conspiracy theories as if they were new. Purporting to reclaim Marilyn as a talented actress and an independent woman rather than a victim, it in fact ploughs the same prurient, necrophile furrow that countless ghouls have explored since she died aged 36 in 1962.

A pouting, posing, peroxide-helmeted Pixie Lott narrates Marilyn’s story in a parody of her breathy tones. Sharleen Cooper Cohen’s script invariably tells us things rather than shows us. If Marilyn hadn’t died of an accidental overdose (the official story) or one deliberately administered up her bum by a bulb enema (the “truth”) she’d be DOA here, from exposure to exposition.

Pixie Lott & Paul Kane Pamela Raith An almost all-male bunch of stiff supernumeraries mill menacingly around Lott in inexplicably paint-spattered costumes, stepping forward to take on crassly caricatured versions of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, Mafia boss Sam Giancana and so on. The American accents are generic or inaccurate. The impression of Laurence Olivier is even worse. The under-rehearsed cast trip over each other’s lines and gesticulate like traffic policemen.

Ryan Ellsworth and Pixie Lott in Who Killed Marilyn? Pamela Raith Director Philip WM. McKinley stages the action around a bed which is cumbersomely rotated by the cast while other bits of set are latched onto and unlatched from it. Scumbled versions of famous images - *that* calendar nude, *that* upskirt shot from The Seven Year Itch – are projected onto the back walls. The Emerald Theatre , formerly a cabaret venue and nightclub, has all the atmosphere of a morgue. Perhaps that’s why it was chosen as the place to dig up Marilyn’s corpse for another go-around.

A Slow Fire at Jermyn Street Theatre review: Ashes to ashes, guff to guff

It doesn’t particularly matter that Lott’s angular face and slim figure are nothing like Marilyn’s. But she’s chosen, or been directed, to fall into a knock-kneed, bottom-out, boobs-hoiked “s-curve” stance whenever she’s not reclining like an odalisque. So horrific elements of Marilyn’s life, like her demented grandmother’s attempt to smother her as an infant, are related in a pinup pose. Ditto her professed love of French and Russian literary classics and her improbable fascination with Cuban politics.

Lott seems to have only two modes of expression as Marilyn – eyelash-batting flirtation and screaming anxiety. She’s done quite a bit of TV acting and a stint in Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the West End in 2016, but on this evidence she shouldn’t give up her day job as a pop star.

Pixie Lott, Henry Proffit and Company in Who Killed Marilyn? Pamela Raith The usual marker points of Marilyn’s life story are laboriously ticked off. Her miscarriages and abortions. The domestic violence she suffered from baseball star Di Maggio. The incongruous romantic match with Arthur Miller, for whom she converted to Judaism.