Speculations | Marylebone Theatre

Speculations, the new political thriller from Torben Betts and directed by Trevor Nunn, has an intriguing premise: what if the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and John F Kennedy were linked? What if journalist Dorothy Kilgallen had uncovered the truth about this connection? And what if this knowledge cost her her own life?

In Speculations, Kilgallen (Janie Dee) is working on a book about her discoveries following an exclusive private interview with Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who shot Lee Harvey Oswald (Joseph Potter). When babysitter Flo (Gloria Obianyo) arrives to care for her son, she begins to explain what she has learned. 

At this point, Lee Newby’s set revolves to allow Oswald, New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello (Ferdy Roberts), Marilyn (Natalie Dunne) and Robert F Kennedy (Jolyon Coy) to tell their own stories. This is initially an impressive party piece, but later becomes tedious and also disrupts the blocking of the piece, forcing the characters to converse at a distance and taking away from the intimacy of their dialogue.

This is, unfortunately, not the end of the play’s issues. Its entire premise requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, with Dorothy choosing to spill her dangerous secrets to a woman she has met only moments before, and the material is sadly not good enough to forgive this far-fetched narrative trick. 

Dee and Potter in particular do their best with the material available to them, and Dee is handed a few prescient lines on her role as a journalist, but the piece as a whole is slow-moving and does not do enough to make the audience really invest in the characters they are watching. 

As it marches on towards its inevitable conclusion, it’s hard to care too much about the tragic fates of most of those on stage. 

Speculations makes some interesting statements on power and on journalism which remain as relevant now as at the time in which the play is set, but ultimately the play needs reworking and reframing to allow the audience to properly connect with and believe in the material.

Speculations runs at the Marylebone Theatre until 17th January. For more information and tickets, follow the link here.

★★☆☆☆ (2*)

Gifted tickets in return for an honest review | Photography by Helen Maybanks