Lucy May Barker as Rebekah Vardy, left, and Laura Dos Santos as Coleen Rooney in Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial
(Picture: ©Tristram Kenton)Well, the team played a blinder. Writer Liv Hennessy and director Lisa Spirling bring the irresistible courtroom drama of the Vardy v Rooney libel trial to hilarious, gripping life using only edited transcripts and a bit of sportscaster commentary.
This style of documentary theatre has previously focused on atrocities, from the Nuremberg Trials to the Grenfell Tower enquiry. But it proves just as good a vehicle for exploring a contemporary media circus.
In 2019, Coleen Rooney, the long-suffering wife of footballer Wayne, realised someone was leaking stories from her private Instagram account to the Sun. By methodically limiting access and planting false tales that duly appeared in print, she identified the leak, announcing to her huge, public social media following: “It’s ………Rebekah Vardy’s account.” Those nine dots are meticulously read out several times on stage.
Vardy was vilified, horribly trolled and elected to sue Rooney for libel. The £3m, seven-day trial saw her describe her former lover Peter Andre’s penis as “a chipolata”, liken Coleen to a pigeon that will inevitably “s**t in your hair” and explain that she’d somehow lost reams of material requested by the court from her phone. Much of this related to conversations with her agent Caroline Watt, who somehow dropped her own phone in the North Sea and didn’t appear in court. Vardy lost the case on July 29 this year.
Four months on, the speedily produced stage adaptation is end-to-end stuff. The setting is half-football pitch, half-courtroom, each dramatic turn of events marked by a whistle and the thwack of boot on ball. Lucy May Barker’s Vardy is immediately on the defensive, denying the evidence of damning earlier messages to Watt with a flat voice and a glassily offended stare.
The thick Scouse accent of Laura Dos Santos’s Coleen is held up for ridicule but she has dignity and cuts through the sophistry of Vardy’s lawyer like Ecuador destroying Qatar’s defence in the opening game of this World Cup. Nathan McMullen and Sharan Phull breathlessly commentate and explain legal points, and also step up to play Watt – voicing those historic text messages – and a delicately discomfited but disarmingly frank Wayne Rooney. The WAG hairstyles are perfect.
The show is still in a raw state, forced to open prematurely after one of the Sun’s stablemates – typical! – barged uninvited into the very first performance. It’s only here for a few Tuesdays, when the theatre’s main show Life of Pi doesn’t play, and has to sit lightly on the bigger production’s set. Could this be a new economic model for the West End? We’ll see.
Anyway, the current sketchiness of Vardy v Rooney doesn’t matter because the source material is utterly compelling and it’s edited in a way that subtly indicts greedy WAGs, smugly patronising lawyers, devious journalists and the voyeuristic audience.
We laugh and scoff but we’re ultimately implicated in the scrutiny loaded onto the Rooneys since their teens and in the vicious abuse hurled not just a Vardy but at her newborn baby.
We thought the Wagatha Christie affair was all over. Well, it isn’t now. I hope this stage adaptation runs and runs.
