Who Killed Marilyn reviews: critics agree the Blonde Bombshell is best left alone

“Only the most devoted fans will get excited by these stubbornly spark-free two hours at London’s Emerald Theatre.”

“This iteration of Marilyn wants to control her own narrative and not be portrayed as 'Marilyn Monroe the f---ing victim’”

“Interwoven with snippets of Monroe’s last few hours – including a conveniently revelatory session with her psychiatrist – are snapshot scenes from her adult life, which paint a cumulative picture of a woman desperate for love and affection.”

“Cooper Cohen fails to avoid the bio-drama booby trap of characters telling each other things they surely already know in order to crowbar in key bits of information.”

“More culpable, however, is director Philip William McKinley, who oversees a production that is almost entirely devoid of energy.”

“The writer Sharleen Cooper Cohen — whose credits include An Officer and a Gentleman: The Musical — rummages through no end of National Enquirer-style speculation, piling up one breathless non-revelation after another.”

“Then comes a cut-and-paste gallop across the highlights of the actress’s rise to fame, the multitasking supporting cast doing their best to make sense of it all.”

“Cohen gives us not a single psychological insight into Marilyn’s true character. All we see is the usual helpless blonde victim of the rampant male ego.”

“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.”

“The under-rehearsed cast trip over each other’s lines and gesticulate like traffic policemen.”

“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.”

“You imagine this drama is setting itself up for something beyond the slew of familiar theories. But there is little to gain from this trot through Monroe’s life, narrated in cliches.”

“Monroe tells us that her husbands only ever saw the famed icon rather than the woman beneath. Ironically, this is what she remains here, due to a thuddingly on-the-nose script that spells out Monroe’s woes and pathologies.”

“Under the direction of Philip Wm McKinley, Lott struts on to a stage with a bed at its centre – both her place of death and an overused motif for the life of a sex symbol.”

“The other performances are also underwhelming, with the men in her life played with a wooden uniformity and no uncanny resemblances.”

“It pays little attention to Norma Jeane – the person she was before she created Marilyn. There are fleeting references to her family history of mental instability, her early life in an orphanage, her experience in a psychiatric unit. These are drive-by glances in a play that prefers to centre Monroe’s sex life, in the most hackneyed of ways.”

“In the programme director Phillip Wm McKinley claims the play lets the audience decide whether what they see onstage is true or not, but when watching it, it seems they already made that decision for us.”

“Despite seemingly based on years of research and the insistence that Monroe isn’t a dumb blonde boy crazy victim, Cooper instead regresses her life with as much substance as a Wikipedia summary.”

“With little cohesion, McKinley’s direction sporadically flashes - quite literally from Jack Weir’s blinding lighting design and Justin Williams’ uninspired set - back and forth between the moments after Monroe's death and a series of memories that are ridiculous at best and crass at worst.”

“It leaves no room for other fascinating areas of Monroe's life such as her relationship with her mentally ill mother.”

“In a time when the media’s obsession with young troubled Hollywood women continues to be rampant, there could be merit behind the exploring the ethics of reexamining Marilyn Monroe’s death. Instead, Who Killed Marilyn? becomes the thing it tries to critique.”