Second Best at Riverside Studios review: Promising debut for Asa Butterfield as Harry Potter reject

For every Ringo Starr there’s a Pete Best, for every Sean Connery a Stanley Baker. For every Daniel Radcliffe?

It takes around ten minutes before this play actually mentions the thing that anyone who’s booked a ticket already knows, which is this: ‘When I was a kid,’ says bespectacled, brown-haired Martin Hill, played by bespectacled, brown-haired Sex Education star Asa Butterfield in his stage debut, ‘I got down to the last two to play Harry Potter.’

The failed audition settles in Martin not as a fun childhood experience but as trauma, and for 80 minutes he tells the story of his life from that moment until the time, 20 odd years later, that his partner becomes pregnant and those memories resurface.

It’s the kind of monologue you might see at the Fringe but given a decent production budget, and someone’s cast an A-lister in it; a brilliantly simple idea, turned into an enjoyable, quietly complex play.

Wisely retitled from the David Foenkinos novel it’s based on, which was called Number Two, adapter Barney Norris deliberately makes this a play set in a world of not-magic. Instead, it’s the real world: one of breakdowns, grief and failure.

In fact the whole vibe, as directed by Michael Longhurst and designed by Fly Davis, is one that is desperately putting distance between itself and the richly fantasy world of Harry Potter.

Martin tells us about his memories in a big white box, with strange things placed around it in slightly unsettling ways: a hospital bed halfway up a wall, a display of crisps partly spilled over, an old cathode ray TV on the floor at the back. It’s like David Lynch came in and moved things around while no one was looking.

It’s all off-kilter, with humour and poignancy sitting uneasily alongside each other. You can see it in Butterfield’s performance, part stand-up routine, part trauma dump. He’s a really decent stage presence, but everything feels so carefully choreographed - his arms do a lot of the delivery, waving, pointing and gesticulating, as if he’s learned a dance routine - that there’s an accidentally awkward layer on top of the authentically awkward thing we know Butterfield excels at.

And yet, there’s also something perfectly believable about the idea that he - or rather, Martin - didn’t quite get cast as Harry Potter; a deprecated, also-ran quality, tinged slightly with sadness (for the record, Butterfield never auditioned; he was three at the time).

Norris’s plays have previously been quite serious, elegiac affairs, so the humour and occasional whiff of whimsy here are welcome, but he still has plenty to say. It’s not about Harry Potter, and Martin spends much of his life trying to avoid anything to do with wizardry, but that allows Norris to explore exactly how embedded the Wizarding World is in our society.

He both relies on and slightly pokes fun at the obsession certain generations (mine especially) have for Harry Potter - and you can read Martin’s increasingly complicated relationship with the boy wizard as a metaphor for the fandom’s. But the play never quite digs into these little subtexts, instead getting distracted by plot, and it’s tempting to see it as self-fulfilling that a play about someone not quite achieving greatness also doesn’t quite achieve greatness.

Still, what Martin discovers is that you don’t have to be the best to be enough, and for 80 minutes this imperfect play, impressively directed and with a promising debut performance from Butterfield, is more than enough.