Marilyn Monroe meets Edith Sitwell in a charming if slight tale
The Dame and the Showgirl
Radio 4 is, lamentably, doing away with the 15-minute drama slot on Woman’s Hour. The amount of time given over to afternoon dramas and Saturday plays seems on the longterm wane. Yet as one audio-drama door closes, another opens. Knowing that Audible customers listen to an average of two hours of content a day, the Amazon-owned company has figured that drama should play a more prominent role in its output. It recently streamed Sebastian Barry’s
On Blueberry Hill, the London run of which was cut short by the pandemic, and has just announced a new production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, with a cast including Toby Jones.
And it’s providing a platform for original drama, too, the latest being The Dame and the Showgirl, which offers a fictional slant on a 1953 encounter in Los Angeles between Marilyn Monroe and Edith Sitwell – youthful Hollywood royalty and ageing British literary aristocracy. In the kind of coup that the Beeb would envy, another Dame, Emma Thompson, stars as the snooty Sitwell, opposite Sinéad Matthews as Monroe.
First-time playwright Simon Berry, who retired as a wine merchant at the age of 60 in 2017 and picked up a pen, was inspired by a black-andwhite photograph of the pair taken by George Silk. Sitwell, semi-reclined on a sofa, contemplates Monroe through dark glasses with an amused smile. Facing her, her interlocutor (whom Sitwell was supposed to write up for Life magazine, though the piece never materialised) beams back, one stilettoed foot tucked behind the other.
Their imagined conversation is less
Emma Thompson brings warmth, even if she sounds like an agony aunt at the end
captivating, but here it settles into a pleasing groove. Rather than proffering ice-breakers, Sitwell is frosty at the start, proclaiming ignorance of Monroe’s film work and, once being brought up to speed, disdain for it. O Henry’s Full House (1952) comes up, and Monroe – sounding so air-headed you fear her brain might float away – explains: “I play a hooker!” “A Madonna of the pavements,” La Sitwell replies grandly. Monroe delightedly repeats the phrase and opines: “That’s swell!” But, before you can say Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a thawing process is under way. Monroe flatteringly quotes lines from Sitwell’s The Web of Eros; the latter rummages in her bag to rustle up a dry Martini; the pair bolt the door against their asinine handlers (sent off on errands).
There’s no revelatory dramatic conflict, more a pattern of contrasts and affinities that explains why they kept in touch and met again (in New York and in Britain, during the filming of 1957’s The Prince and the Showgirl). They compare notes on childhood unhappiness and parental neglect. Sitwell smarts at being derided as ugly, while Monroe – dreading the impending Playboy use of old nude shots – knows she’s being used and objectified.
Thompson’s natural warmth adds gradual flesh to the bones of Berry’s outline, sketchy but succinct, of burgeoning female solidarity. Still, she can’t avoid Sitwell sounding like an agony aunt near the end. “Give it up, all this stardom nonsense – have children, that’s true immortality,” she tartly advises as the hour winds up. My own advice to The Dame and the Showgirl’s latecoming author is to persist, and enlarge this work to encompass the pair’s other meetings. As things stand, with clunky exposition meeting gentle charm, it’s a toss-up as to whether it warrants one of your precious Audible credits.