A courtroom drama in desperate need of extra time.
Way back in 2019, Coleen Rooney started the fire that was Vardy v Rooney when she pointed the finger at Rebekah Vardy for leaking her private Instagram posts to the tabloids. Spreading like wildfire, you’d have been hard-pressed to find someone not keeping up with the scandal. Sadly, what promised to be a riveting and crackling courtroom drama has well and truly sluiced any flame that was left, leaving this dramatization as a bedraggled and limp mess.
Treated as spectators to a sport, the trial is pulled apart in front of our eyes; every ounce of promised comedy and fun from the sporting puns is tossed aside as the show attempts the plough through 7 days’ worth of trial in a matter of hours. Part of the show’s draw is its verbatim nature, but this only further hinders the show. Firstly, the resulting language is dry and unengaging, ultimately, we are watching a condensed court trial that needs to keep jumping from point to point in an attempt to cover everything required. Secondly, it splits the world of the play into two pieces, the trial and the pundit narrators that interrupt with simplified explanations of what has just occurred. The overall feeling is laborious, this does not feel like a show that is excited or looking forward to sharing its story. Rather, it weighs itself down and always feels the need to push to the next point for fear of not having enough time to properly deal with the trial.
Not all is lost though, Polly Sullivan’s set is tonally perfect. A tacky wonder full of plastic chairs, thin wooden veneers, and fake grass pitches. It is here our combatants do battle, with strong performances from both Laura Dos Santos (Coleen Rooney) and Lucy May Barker (Rebekah Vardy). Both manage to stay afloat within the legal quagmire, successfully building believable and complex performances throughout. Sadly, this is not the case for either lawyer, their only purpose is to score legal goal after legal goal, a process that soon begins to grate.
An uncomfortable sense of voyeurism purveys the performance. Accents are exaggerated in a bid to generate laughs; jokes are told to expose a lack of intelligence or knowledge. It feels as though we are to laugh at not just the situation, but the women whose lives are caught within it and for our entertainment we can laugh at their struggles.
Vardy v Rooney veers clear of taking a true stance on any of this. Maybe this is a production that highlights the pervasive and destructive role of social media in our lives, or potentially it is to deride those who do not appear to work for a living and air their grievances in public for any amount of exposure. What is clear is that it feels half baked, and through attempting to cover everything we get a lacklustre realisation of all.