Rarely has the cult of celebrity alighted on someone with the intensity it struck Marilyn Monroe. More than 60 years after her death, the blond mop, the wafting white dress and that wiggle of a walk continue to inspire imitators.
EastEnders actor Michelle Collins, making her fringe debut, once came across such an acolyte in LA and was fascinated. The woman, in her 60s, pulled up in a motorhome and emerged looking just like the star of Some Like It Hot. What need for fame, what thirst for attention, what emotional hunger could drive such a person?
The encounter stayed with her and, with playwright Ben Weatherill picking up where her late friend Stewart Permutt left off, she now plays Denise, a girl from Southend who has wound up in the US as a 61-year-old Monroe lookalike, hustling for loose change as a street entertainer by a convenient air vent.
In front of an adoring audience, Collins plays Denise with a mixture of the hard-bitten and the gullible. Under the direction of Alexandra Spencer-Jones, she also does a suitably breathy and sweet-voiced rendition of River of No Return, suggesting that with the right breaks, this copycat performer could have done all right for herself.
For no obvious reason, Denise has chosen to tell her life story to her pet snake. And what a dismal tale it is. The script is a litany of letdowns, exploitation, unwanted pregnancy, dead-end gigs, spiced up with one unlikely melodramatic twist. It aspires to be tragic but comes across as plain miserable.
It would be one thing if these were the backstage anecdotes of a real actor, quite another for them to be fictional. Why spend time with such a lost and deluded person? My performance was interrupted moments before the fiery denouement by someone falling ill, but it would take more than a dramatic ending to elevate such a dreary play.
• At the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, until 25 August.
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