Programme Note

The nine short scenes of M.M. combine live with pre-recorded elements: audio, text and film. M.M. explores how we create different layers of reality and perception, different characters in our own one story, through make-up and clothes, in photos, lighting and location, on film, and with alcohol and pharmaceuticals. It describes, through the lens of Marilyn Monroe, how we can get lost in that tangle of characters. The interplay between the pre-filmed and the live elements toy with time and timelessness, memory, quotation and place, as well as with how we craft and create our own character in life.

Those layers are opened up in Movement Two, which quotes a scene from the 1954 film There’s No Business Like Show Business. Marilyn Monroe plays an actress. In the scene, her character is filming a scene for the film-within-the-film. Presented here with the narrator replacing Marilyn’s character, in a contemporary setting, it becomes a memory of a film-within-a-film-within-the-film-within-M.M. The narrator is suddenly multiple characters, from different times and realities (fictional and real), all built on and relying on each other.

Marilyn Monroe was so famous in her own lifetime that her initials were sufficient to identify her in newspaper headlines. And thus M.M. begins with a series of plays on words delving into the French reading of the English letters. ‘M.M.’ becomes ‘aime aime’ (‘love love’). Later, a recurring theme of the famous white Hollywood letters, becomes ‘H’ ‘O’ ‘L’, ’hache’ ‘oh!’ ‘elle’ or ‘axe’ ‘oh!’ ‘she’.

M.M. is a portrait of Marilyn Monroe. While absent explicitly in name and image from the work, it remains a tribute to the actress, to the woman and to the characters she invented, and to the fascination she still inspires.