Vardy v Rooney - Wyndham's / Ambassadors / Tour

I found this absolutely hilarious at the time, but now it’s done I am not sure I need to see a play about it as well as a TV drama and a podcast ….

It was a fine distraction from politics and disaster but its beauty was in its triviality.

Who is making money out of this? Is Vardy trying to recoup?

Pathetic.

They're really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

How does a first time playwright (okay she’s written one play before but it doesn’t appear to have ever been staged) get a major gig like this?

I’m all for opportunities for new writers, but putting someone completely inexperienced straight into the West End with a play not of her own creation feels like a fail all round.

Saw this on Tuesday, and Lucy May Barker's Rebekah Vardy had me laughing like a drain! A classic comedy performance!

Some spoilers follow. . .

The key is directly intercutting her cool yet transparently lying testimony with her more frank WhatsApp messages, in which she excitedly and evilly destroys everybody she talks about. Noone else has depicted the story this way and it's pure comedy, and gives this production a distinctiveness from any mundane news report. This is comedy.

Outwardly, Barker's Vardy resembles one of those meticulously coiffured, inscrutable supermodels, that back up Robert Palmer in his classic "Addicted to Love" music video. Attitudinally, she is in massively miserable, exaggerated trout-pout, withholding mode. But then in the WhatsApps, she explodes in gossipy gleeful malevolence, and then quickly becomes coy again. It is so so SO funny! It is a classic comedy performance, and it skewers Rebekah Vardy as effectively and efficiently as any Spitting Image puppet skewered anybody ever!

Once Barker's comedy masterclass is over, the second half can't match it.

Yet Laura Dos Santos's Coleen Rooney, in her own way, gives us classic Columbo, a wolf in sheep's clothing: coming on with her moonboot disadvantage, her legal disadvantage (in British law, the advantage is with the "defamed" litigant), her Scouse-outsider-in-the-bewigged-fancy-London-court disadvantage, her plain-speaking-in-a-world-of-dissemblers disadvantage, and then she hilariously takes them all apart! It's very funny, just not as funny as Vardy.

Nothing else in the show compares to the two principals, not the football commentary type legal reporting, not the other witnesses, not the lawyers, though all those things are functional.

But the two main witness testimonies are fantastic, though the show peaks in the first half, with the unforgettable comic portrayal of Vardy by Lucy May Barker!

5 stars for Barker, 4 stars for Dos Santos, 3 stars for everything else: overall, 4 stars from me.

If I was organising an office Christmas party this year ...

Looks like this is going on tour. It's heading to The Lowry in June.

I think they went about this the wrong way. The experience was basically what I had expected out of Best of Enemies: a somewhat interesting story of this big public dispute but not all that interesting as a play. Like I enjoyed hearing about the case and such (I had no prior knowledge) but I think I would’ve been ok with a 20 minute YouTube video rather than a full 2 act play (with an unnecessary interval imo). I think the “in their own words” concept held it back the most, keeping them from being able to use more license to make it actually theatrical. Instead they were limited to a using a football match framing device which is the weakest aspect of the show. All of those segments with the announcers either were just exposition or seemed awkward and unnecessary (to no fault of the actors, they both played their other roles well.) If nothing else I would’ve preferred they lean much more into the football match idea so it comes off as a larger than life goofy portrayal consistently rather than shoved in at different times. The whole cast does well with it, Lucy May Barker especially, again it just doesn’t feel that theatrical. It was a very enjoyable watch for me since I didn’t know any of the details of the case or the outcome, but I don’t imagine there being much value if that’s not the case.

I only saw it for the first time this week but did agree that the first half was way better than the second. So much so, it felt like it could’ve done away with the interval and just shortened the whole thing.