Barney Norris’s one-man play runs until 22 February
It’s 1999 and a ten-year-old boy called Martin is on the cusp of his big break. He is one of the final two actors being considered to play Harry Potter in the movie franchise that is about to launch. He doesn’t get the part – and the rest is history. For the remainder of his life, he must deal with the fact that he came second best to Daniel Radcliffe.
That’s the story behind Barney Norris’s scintillating monologue, based on the best-selling novel by French writer David Foenkinos. It isn’t true. Someone must have come second to Radcliffe, but it wasn’t this boy. This is a fantasy that feeds into the way that everyone is always a runner-up in something – and the terrible effect it can have on our lives. It is an unexpected tale for our times, piercing and perceptive, and very, very funny.
That it marks the theatre debut of Asa Butterfield adds a layer of deliciousness to the conceit. Butterfield, best known as Otis in Netflix’s Sex Education, was a successful child actor who made his screen debut at the age of eight and went on to star in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.
Wearing glasses and a worried expression, he brings all his skill and his refined comic timing to the stage, gently tugging the audience into complicity, holding every line and each moment so it lands with maximum effect, often finding high humour and deep sadness in the same phrase as he contemplates “the different life I once almost had.”
Norris’s elegant structure assists him in the telling of this engrossing tale. The piece begins not with the disappointment of being beaten by “he who must not be named” but with the excitement of a three-month scan. The phrase “the story starts” is repeated, as Butterfield traces the moment he met his love, his baby was conceived – and then falls into the deepest panic as his old sense of failure begins to return.
What emerges is not simply a narrative of thespian failure, but a much deeper, more complicated picture of a man haunted by the sense that he can never be good enough, that his life is caricaturised by his inability to hold on to anything, by a constant sense of loss. These are sentiments that everyone can share and at least half of the pleasure of Second Best is its every person quality.
Yet the other half is the Harry Potter jokes. There’s even a fleeting Radcliffe impersonation, and at one point Butterfield dons the full hat and wand. “To grow up when I did and have nothing to do with Harry Potter wasn’t the easiest thing,” Martin wryly remarks. He tries to shut out the schoolboy wizard, but he has a way of appearing – on a book on a girlfriend’s bedside table, or in the lettering above the psychiatric unit where he is finally admitted when his misery and fury become too much.
This is part of a darker strain, where – as he remarks – “having somehow missed the part on screen, I’ve taken it in real life.” It’s arguable that some of these beats are too sad to be treated with such insouciance, and that the resolution – which becomes a story of someone “putting me first” – is a little too glib.
But Butterfield’s performance has such precision and swagger that it sweeps you along. Michael Longhurst’s direction also has great flair, turning Fly Davis’s white box of a set into a visual playground, where a hospital bed flies in the sky, and heavy ash rains down on the protagonist at moments of his deepest gloom. Paule Constable’s lighting and Richard Hammarton’s soundscape also help to build the world and the mood that surrounds Martin as he battles to free himself from his past.
The overall effect is surprisingly rich, a morality tale wrapped in a wizard’s cloak, an unexpected and engrossing chronicle for our times.