Second Best review – Asa Butterfield is first-class as Harry Potter runner-up
If one of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues were delivered by a hyperactive narrator in a pristine modern art gallery, the result might resemble Second Best, which Barney Norris has adapted from the novel by David Foenkinos. Gazing at Fly Davis’s vast white cube of a set, audiences may be reminded of the dazzling limbo where the last scrap of Voldemort’s soul is found in the final Harry Potter film. Don’t mention that to Martin, the affable but intense fellow pacing around the stage. As a child, he got down to the last two in the auditions to play Harry. He believed he had put the disappointment behind him. But when he faints during his pregnant girlfriend’s ultrasound, the shock unlocks a whole chamber of secrets.
In Michael Longhurst’s spare production, augmented by Paule Constable’s forensic lighting and Richard Hammarton’s unsettling score and sound design, Martin is going up the wall. Literally so at one point, when he clambers on top of a wardrobe to reach the hospital bed high above him, which protrudes from the set like a poking tongue. In what appears to be a surrealist sculpture, packets of crisps tumble from their rack in a frozen cascade. Like the baked potato taped to the wall, and the camcorder that Martin turns on the audience in a kind of lo-tech riposte to Ivo van Hove, these turn out to be the building blocks of his neurosis.
Norris dismantles those blocks with care, though there remain a few areas where insight is lacking. Observations about the downside of fame, the bullet that Martin dodged, tend toward the banal, and the characterisation of his girlfriend as a holy saviour is simplistic. She’s even a doctor: healing is her profession. What if she were in HR?
Making his stage debut, Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield whooshes the action along, moving economically between characters (his switch to playing Martin’s stepfather is all in the shoulders) and exuding a charm that is never ingratiating. Indeed, there is real finesse in his ability to inhabit a man who is in need without seeming needy. Parts of this one-person play could be fortified and fleshed-out, but no one could apply its title to his performance.
At Riverside Studios, London, until 22 February.
