Vardy V Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial is a camp courtroom comedy – review
We daresay you’ve probably heard about this story already but, for the benefit of anyone who may somehow have missed the news over the last several years, there was a high-profile falling out between Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy – the celebrity wives of footballers Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy – over leaked stories about Coleen which ended up in the Sun newspaper.
In 2019, having done some online sleuthing, Coleen publicly named Rebekah (or rather, her Instagram account) as the source of the leak to journalists.
Rebekah subsequently sued for libel in a case which ended up in the High Court last year; it’s here that the action for this play unfurls.
We weren’t entirely sure what to expect from this show but what we saw was a pleasant surprise. It very much plays out like a football match, with two halves lasting about 45 minutes each, and our hosts for the evening move the action forward in the style of match commentators; our judge adjudicates proceedings as a football referee would, making judicious use of a whistle and brandishing red and yellow cards in the latter stages of the evening; whenever one side wins an argument there’s a goal-style celebration with sound effects of a crowd cheering.
