Martin has a meltdown during his pregnant partner’s 12-week scan. For reasons he can’t divine, the prospect of fatherhood is dredging up his childhood demons, specifically the lingering humiliation of being passed over for the film role of Harry Potter when he was 10. These flashbacks trigger a reappraisal of a life lived in the shadow of the Potter franchise that has dogged Martin like an inescapable flock of Dementors.
If this sounds like a slender premise, don’t be fooled. Adapted by Barney Norris from David Foenkinos’s bestselling 2022 French novel, directed by Michael Longhurst, Second Best is a deceptively unassuming play. What starts out like a comical but mundane monologue soon becomes an elegant meditation on the misshapen nature of trauma.
Asa Butterfield, making his stage debut, is also deceptively unassuming. Roaming the icy white set like a nervy standup, employing a methodical, Ben Whishaw-esque delivery, he gradually lets slip Martin’s whirring anxiety as we begin to glimpse how much agony has become entangled with his lifelong antipathy towards a certain boy wizard.
Both the play and its execution excel here, evoking the jangling errors of association that hardwire in the traumatised mind well into adulthood. Two collapsing metal shelves frozen at the edge of the stage serve not only as an indelible reminder of the corner shop where Martin’s father suffered a seizure but also, awkwardly, the twin towers of the World Trade Center, which fell the same day.
Only its closing moments let the show down, plucking a happy ending from thin air like the golden snitch, with promises of plain sailing and domestic bliss. Better to remember Second Best for the powerful, well-earned conclusion Martin reaches a little earlier on: “Maybe no one gets over anything.”
• Second Best is at the Riverside Studios, London, until 1 March
