Kim Kardashian and Spice Girls are naked ambition gone viral

I went to Dublin’s Light House Cinema the other night to see director Ivo van Hove’s British National Theatre production of All About Eve live-streamed from London. The experience of going to the flicks to see a piece of live theatre that had been adapted from a 1950s film script by Joseph L Mankiewicz, which in turn was a version of the American writer Mary Orr’s 1940s short story (and subsequent radio play) The Wisdom of Eve, was a little mind-boggling.

The cross-pollination and blurring of creative lines was gratifyingly successful, however, and having never before been to a live-streamed play, I’m now sold on the idea.

In the production, Gillian Anderson, of X-Files fame, plays legendary Broadway star Margo Channing (a role created on-screen by the magnificent Bette Davis), while English actor Lily James, who is young, beautiful and all the rage, plays Eve, the stagestruck fan with the sweet smile and toxic ambition.

The nuts and bolts of the story are familiar. Margo, ageing and insecure, has her fragile ego bolstered by conniving ingenue Eve, and before you can say “make mine a bourbon”, her position as queen bee of the New York theatre scene has been usurped by her erstwhile admirer. While Margo is reduced to throwing her wigs around, marrying her director and giving up the stage to embrace domesticity, Eve, the usurper, inherits not just Margo’s fame but also the neuroses, psychosis and derangement that go with it.

I am not a huggy person. Don’t worry, my friend said. You can pretend to hug me

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Could I stand naked before a full-length mirror to get my fat cells frozen?

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I lay down on the rug and the next thing I’m on the phone to my dead mother

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Women who dreamt of making art ended up making beds and sandwiches

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The action, which takes place backstage and at various gin-soaked cocktail parties, was thought at the time of the film’s release to reveal something of the unknown lives of silver-screen celebrities (including Marilyn Monroe, who, as another dewy-eyed ingenue in director/writer Mankiewicz’s pithy version, played the stuffing in the casting couch).

Supposedly lifting the curtain on a world of jealousy and ambition, some saw the Oscar-winning film as contributing to a burgeoning fascination with celebrity. But that was back in the days when celebrity was earned and may even have had some link to craft and talent. Now, if you’re in the public eye and really really want what you really really want – to capture the capricious attention of a media-saturated public – you have to be more cunning than the far-from-angelic Eve could have dreamt about as she lay scheming in her silken bed.

Stay in the spotlight

It’s tempting to imagine that the imperative to stay in the spotlight until the bitter end might lie behind some recent celebrity revelations, including the storm in a D-cup over an alleged sexual fling in their heyday between two now-ageing Spice Girls, the not-remotely-scary Mel Brown and the used-to be-ginger Geri Halliwell. The band’s publicists, it could be speculated, might have feared that the four Spices who are shortly going back on the road have been so long in the rack that they’d lost their pungency.

But while their sapphic stories and trips down mammary lane (recollections of driving naked-breasted up and down the motorways at the height of their fame) have claimed them some extra column inches, their efforts have nothing on the recent singular pronouncement from Koala Kardashian, or whatever her name is. (I mean the one who’s married to Kanye West and has the giddily impressive and much-photographed backside.) Recently, the famous-for-being-famous media phenomenon appeased the publicity gods by sharing with her legions of followers the staggering news that she is studying to be a criminal lawyer.

It transpires that Knickerbocker Kardashian, who intends taking her bar exams as soon as her nails are dry, is not entirely without legal experience, having assisted the Trump administration by advising it on penal reform and the system of clemency – not the easiest of tasks, admittedly. (And look, I'm not necessarily knocking the woman – she did manage to get a pardon for an older female prisoner who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for a non-violent first-time drug offence.)

Who knows what Kooky could achieve once she has an actual law degree? Maybe she’ll surprise the whole lot of us and do an All-About-Eve job on Brett Kavanaugh by persuading Trump to appoint her to the US supreme court in his place. Then Kavanaugh could bugger off and get himself a bottom full of Botox and his own table-thumping, tear-stained reality-TV show instead. As Margo Channing warned: “Strap yourselves in, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”