DramaLondonReview

Second Best – Riverside Studios, London

Reviewer: Maryam Philpott

Writer: Barney Norris

Director: Michael Longhurst

Screen star Asa Butterfield makes his stage debut in new monologue, Second Best by Barney Norris, at Riverside Studios, an exploration of missed opportunities and recurring trauma that manifests periodically throughout the character’s life. “Sometimes,” protagonist Martin exclaims, “two people’s stories just clash,” and they do in Norris’ play. Not just because the character got down to the last two when applying for the role of Harry Potter and resents the life he could have had, but because the writer tries to compress two slightly different lives together without fully investing in the idea of continuous suffering and what it takes from Martin each time.

Attending the three-month scan of his first child, museum attendant Martin is thrilled. However, over the remaining six months, he has a series of flashbacks to his childhood that start to intrude on his current life with wife Sophie. Reliving his intense aversion to Harry Potter following a failed audition, Martin’s experience is bound up with family tragedy and its consequences, which affects his interior life in tune with Sophie’s physical development.

Running at a little over 80 minutes, Norris’s comedy-drama is packed full of incident, so many dramatic marker points that the overall story starts to strain as the emotional connections begin to feel a little disparate. The most interesting strand is naturally the life-long attempt to come to terms with being second best to “he who should not be named” (Daniel Radcliffe in this case) as Martin engagingly describes the process of repetitive auditions, the expectations of the adults who judged and coerced him, as well as the pain of seeing the onslaught of movie marketing that engulfs him as a teenager.

Forget the lost fame and money, this rejection should be at the heart of the story, the core trauma that Norris could build the rest of the monologue around and help to make sense of Martin’s reaction to becoming a father and the relationship to his own family that emerges from it. But Norris unknowingly starts writing a second character, situating the play in a bigger concurrent story of death, physical and emotional abuse and psychiatric breakdown, big drama moments that push against the more interesting character study beneath.

There is a middle ground between the two, the story of Martin’s road not taken needs an emotional core to prevent it from becoming too shallow, but Second Best needs to reign in the heaped-on miseries to keep the audience onside. It is the small, everyday scenarios that actually have more impact and an anecdote about trying immersion therapy after watching the fifth Harry Potter film has far more resonance and a better tragi-comic balance than the more elaborate experiences that Norris foists on his character.

Norris’s core theme – that every trauma takes a piece of us – is a valuable one but the audience needs to believe more in the other characters to properly bring this to life, none of whom have substance in the present draft, especially the women who are little more than a collection of lines. Butterfield has a strong stage presence, performing a consuming and technically complex piece with practised ease and is particularly adept at controlling the different flow of memories, voices and fears that plague Martin in what is a consummate debut.

There is lots of really good stuff in Norris’ play, it moves along quickly, the comedy flows fairly regularly and the Harry Potter references are entertainingly incorporated, but the play never really shows us how being second best shaped Martin’s life and just why those deep-seated inadequacies choose to reassert themselves right now.

Runs until 22 February 2025

The Reviews Hub Score

Consummate debut

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The Reviews Hub - London

The Reviews Hub London is under the editorship of Richard Maguire. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.

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