Theatre review: Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial

It's ………

A speedy journey of less than a year from real-life courtroom drama to verbatim stage drama, the background to Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial is a story I should probably recap, although I have a feeling this very British celebrity feud is one that probably became infamous worldwide: Two women best known for being the wives - aka WAGs - of top-flight football players, Coleen Rooney (Laura Dos Santos) and Rebekah Vardy (Lucy May Barker) had been fodder for newspaper gossip columns for years. When an increasing number of personal stories were published about her, Rooney suspected someone on her private Instagram account had been leaking them to the press and set a classic trap: She planted fake stories only her prime suspect could see, and when they duly appeared in the papers she publicly called her out in the most famous ellipsis since Monty Python: "It's ……… Rebekah Vardy's account.”

Vardy immediately sued for libel, and under English law it's the defendant's duty to prove their accusation true. Three years later the case reached the courts: Liv Hennessy's play adapts the actual court transcripts into a two-hour show, although it does also add its own commentary in the form of two pundits (Halema Hussain and Nathan McMullen) who interrupt the action occasionally as if commentating on a football match.

Apart from that the dialogue is pretty straightforwardly a condensed version of the 7-day trial, but Lisa Spirling's production mines it for every moment of absurd comedy. For the London leg of its tour, the play is at the Ambassadors Theatre, next to The Mousetrap, and so in honour of Rooney's detective skills it's been temporarily rechristened The Scousetrap - if that kind of tongue-in-cheek humour works for you, then you'd probably enjoy its similarly irreverent approach to court transcripts.

Vardy spent four of the seven days on the stand, so her questioning by Rooney's barrister (Tom Turner) takes up the entire first act. Barker has a lot of fun jumping between the po-faced image she tries to present in court, and the gossipy WhatsApp conversations with the elusive PR Caroline Watt (Hussain,) assumed to be the go-between with The Sun but excusing herself from the trial just as mysteriously as all their conversations disappeared when the court records asked for them (notoriously, Vardy accidentally deleted all her messages at the precise moment that Watt's phone accidentally ended up in the North Sea.)

There's also her seemingly unfailing ability to dig herself ever deeper holes: From her first brush with fame being a humiliating kiss'n'tell story on Peter Andre, to the surviving WhatsApp messages literally and explicitly saying she wants to do the exact thing she's accused of, Vardy's sheepish "Yeah... I can see how it reads badly....." practically becomes a catchphrase. Rooney is clearly too smart to provide quite as many entertaining own goals when it's Hugh Tomlinson QC's (Jonathan Broadbent) turn to question her, but Dos Santos still brings value in her determination, and for anyone who didn't know the outcome this second act does, if not cast doubt on whether Vardy was involved, at least show how onerous the burden of proof is on Rooney.

It's still consistently funny though, including crowd-pleasing turns from McMullen as both the husbands. I also liked the production's attention to detail in mining gags - particularly the moment Verna Vyas' inscrutable Mrs Justice Steyn reaches enthusiastically to make notes about Gemma Collins faceplanting on Dancing on Ice. The speed with which it's arrived on stage means Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial definitely feels like a quick grab at profiting from a story while it's still in the public eye, but that's contradicted by how well the end result stands up as an entertaining show that's all the more surreal for being based word-for-word on truth.

Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial is booking until the 20th of May at the Ambassadors Theatre; then continuing on tour to Woking, Liverpool, Southend, Dublin, Salford and Brighton.

Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith.