Showing @ Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Tue 15 Mar – Sat 2 Apr

After learning of Monroe’s death in 1962, actor and director John Huston reacted by saying that Marilyn wasn’t killed by Hollywood. “The girl was an addict of sleeping tablets and she was made so by the goddamn doctors”. It seems the idea of fame is ultimately more damaging than the status itself. Whilst this may seem obvious, all we’ve done since the 60s is build on this ethereal notion of the icon, and maybe there will be flashes of social satire, irony and critique in Philip Howard’s production of Sue Glover’s new play, Marilyn.

It’s the summer of 1960 and Marilyn Monroe (Frances Thorburn) finds herself in the adjacent apartment to French actress Simone Signoret (Dominique Hollier) at the infamous Beverley Hills Hotel. While filming of the musical comedy Let’s Make Love gets underway, the pair “form an uneasy friendship, plagued by jealousy and insecurity”. Revealing the “raw complexities of celebrity lives”, Howard dramatises Monroe’s fiery lifestyle, dicey off-set behaviour and, at times, destructive introspection.

There is no doubt that the glamorised sexiness of the 60s will be recreated for Glover’s text, as Hollywood authenticity seems to ooze from the online trailers and production shots. But it’s just an ideal, a leather-sofa era, a crystal-glass champagne bubble for the prosperous and well-to-do. Yet this intangible idea of success remains one of the most cancerous forces in the formation of individuality, as we have been conditioned to associate affluence, material possession and notoriety with achievement. Could this play allude to a sheer social and cultural transparency which has yet to be truly spotlighted in the 21st century? Our political and socioeconomic uprisings have already exposed the fantasy that is our financial system and the idea of the ‘star’ is an identically indefinable creation, a metagoal designed to reify and devalue. In modern society, it’s the Cheryl Cole syndrome.

Monroe was the ultimate icon, the feminine force that carried a perceived embodiment of female magnetism for years. But she rode the wave of fame in the minds of the public and based her goals around the Utopian sentiment of “I want to be wonderful”. So perhaps we can expect that myopic view of appreciation and eminence borne out in Glover’s deconstruction of Monroe’s affairs to be a driving force in the portrayal of an idol. It’s a frightening concept, but could we also see the shadowy paradigms we’ve strove for over the last fifty years: money, power, success, and beauty – lampooned as fake constructs of a world in desperate need of a complete, blanket makeover?