Asa Butterfield in Second Best. Photo Hugo GlendinningA gloss white interior is dominated by a large wooden transportation packing case. The stage is further furnished with picture frames propped against a wall, a film camera perched on a tri-pod and tucked into a corner, a TV monitor, and perhaps most incongruously, a hospital bed mounted half-way up a wall. We could be in a modern Cork Street art gallery. But no, Martin is about to use these props (and others) to tell us about those key events in his young life which have proved exciting, significant or more especially, have developed into something far more traumatising.
Playwright Barney Norris leaves behind the underwhelming The Band Back Together and once again hits his stride with an emotionally charged and occasionally very funny monologue, which attempts (and in the main, succeeds) in encompassing The Mona Lisa, Harry Potter, juvenile bullying, jacket potatoes, yet more Harry Potter, parental death, a tin foil collection, a barbecue stabbing, an ultrasound fainting episode and would you believe, still more Harry Potter.
Martin we learn, endured the mild childhood disappointment of being the front runner to play the boy wizard, only to be pipped at the final casting session by a lad who now, must not be named. Following the death of his film props making father, Martin dwells across the channel with his French mother and her exceedingly unpleasant partner who enjoys a level of surreptitious Gallic gaslighting, the cruelty of which is synonymous with the Dursley family’s cupboard under the stairs reign of terror at HP’s expense.
When Martin loses his tether at a family barbecue, suffers a breakdown and is forced to endure a sojourn at a mental institution, he entertains the notion that he might become a hospital porter, but like house painter, the initials bode ill.
The entertaining ramble, which Butterfield delivers with an easy conviviality across the height and breadth of the stage, (crawling in dust or perched precariously on the aforementioned bed half-way up the wall), takes us from the imminent birth of his child, through his own childhood trauma and neatly back to the party where he and his partner Sophie first met. In some ways it is all a little too tidy and as a consequence may come across as a tad glib, but this is a yarn, with threads, its fair share of knotty moments and others where you’ll be in stitches, simply at the sight of this actor’s natural predisposition to convey awkward humanity.
Directed by Michael Longhurst with a playfully inventive set by Fly Davis, SECOND BEST plays at Riverside Studios until 22 February.
