Brighton Fringe 2024

Making Marilyn

Julie Burchill, Daniel Raven

Genre: Comedy, Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Historical, Live Music, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Latest at Horatio’s Bar

Festival: Brighton Fringe

Low Down

Review

“Champagne… for mornings when you have hope. The afternoons for disappointment.” The evenings though are anything but. Returning with a new play, Julie Burchill and Daniel Raven’s Making Marilyn now in Latest’s new home at Horatio’s Bar on the Palace Pier is directed by Carole Todd till May 4^th.

What a difference a Fringe Year makes. This year’s Fringe opens with a revelation. Famed Marilyn Monroe actor/impersonator Suzie Kennedy pronounces on the delights of an i-phone. As Marilyn Monroe.

No, she’s not been transported to the future, nor called up as an avatar. This is Monroe in the midst of making a film that writes its own epitaph: Something’s Got to Give.

Last year Burchill and Raven co-wrote an amusing swipe at avocado living, Awful People. Injecting contemporary traumas like Ukraine it was up-to-the-decade smart; though its dramaturgy recalled Play for Today, a more leisurely era whose lines cried for pace.

Their Making Marilyn is frankly unrecognizable as by the same two authors; except for the inimitable wit which lands so pointedly here and in character you want to scribble it down on your partner’s t-shirt and seduce them back home by taking it off repeating the lines.

This time though it’s a complex mix of historical character with a dystopic twist. Or as one character riffing on L. P. Hartley puts it. “The future’s a different country. They do things differently there.” Particularly when it messes with itself messing with the past.

Indeed when young British fan Josh (Luke O’Dell) arrives at Monroe’s apartment to interview her in late June 1962, it’s Monroe who gives him back an British education he missed out on.

Especially since he seems so coy about having sex (“Sex doesn’t always work, but it solves a lot of things” Monroe purrs), despite almost quivering with excitement. O’Dell’s fresh approach mixes adoration, desire, sensitivity with something withheld.

Kennedy is as you’d expect consummate Monroe. The difference is the lines she delivers, partly to Josh’s antique (to us) dictaphone. Josh knows everything about Monroe, who’s amused, flattered, bemused and intrigued.

Both characters affirm their adoration of Dorothy Parker: the most physical moment comes when they quote Parker’s favourite lines on suicide in unison and O’Dell sweeps Kennedy up in his arms. It’s poignant for Josh, but for Monroe, just another slipping-down day.

Quoting from T S Eliot’s Little Gidding Monroe more or less tells Josh his theme – and later reminds him when its truth lands: “We shall not cease from exploration./And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started./And know the place for the first time.”

Burchill and Raven reinvest Monroe with Arthur Miller’s version of a blisteringly intelligent woman. Not the parodic Monroe of Terry Johnson’s Insignificance, where Monroe learns Relatively by rote. But grounded in what Miller’s suggested (latterly) nears the Monroe we see here. Ironic, since Miller’s the butt.

Josh is bewitched by Monroe’s love of champagne and poetry, far more than Miller’s film scripts. Bus Stop is Josh’s favourite not just because of that updraught. And… The Misfits they agree her worst.

Later Monroe throws out the end of Matthew Arnold’s infinitely melancholy Victorian self-recognition ‘Dover Beach’; made even more famous by Ray Bradbury’s 1953 story Fahrenheit 451, though Truffaut’s film came in 1967. Arnold’s world is a prophesy:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Arnold via Monroe startles Josh. Something he lets slip early on alerts us to another dimension altogether.

They’re often interrupted by room service, Monroe having summoned it. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Candy keeps returning with more champagne, bidden (often) or eventually unbidden.  Candy (Kirsty Brewster-Brown) from Tennessee – or is it Kansas – asks so many pert questions. And chemistry with Josh is instant and spiky, Monroe notices. Is that maid jealous? After five minutes?

Brewster-Brown has a nice line in lil-‘ol Tennessee but another voice full of pith and spit reserved for Josh. Indeed so consummately duplicitous is Candy you might call her a pith-artist. She certainly makes do with the tiniest gobful or smear. Brewster-Brown glows conspiracy.

Making use of the gentle thrust part of the stage the clean blue-themed design has been realised by placing bed stage-right and the bijou vanity unit where champagne bottles go to die at the opposite end, with a couple of chairs. It’s clear of clutter whilst invoking it.

Sound and music is a collaborative effort; elements like cork-popping are pre-recorded and synched to the action. Performers are miced-up. Only occasionally did mics blur delivery; and there’s a small issue with vocal projection.

It’s a drama full of satisfying twists and resonances beyond them. It should enjoy another run very soon. There’s possible questions over one neat tie-up, but of the elegant finale none at all. Everything’s tight, witty, pacily delivered.

It’s the sharpest thing you’ll see this early at the Fringe, quite possibly one of the best this year. It has time to be too, lasting 100 minutes with an interval. A must-see.

Published May 3, 2024May 3, 2024 by Simon Jenner