Riverside Studios, London
Barney Norris’s adaptation of David Foenkinos’s novel shows us a man who just missed out on stardom and is now facing fatherhood

If one of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues were delivered by a hyperactive narrator in a pristine modern art gallery, the result might resemble Second Best, which Barney Norris has adapted from the novel by David Foenkinos. Gazing at Fly Davis’s vast white cube of a set, audiences may be reminded of the dazzling limbo where the last scrap of Voldemort’s soul is found in the final Harry Potter film. Don’t mention that to Martin, the affable but intense fellow pacing around the stage. As a child, he got down to the last two in the auditions to play Harry. He believed he had put the disappointment behind him. But when he faints during his pregnant girlfriend’s ultrasound, the shock unlocks a whole chamber of secrets.

In Michael Longhurst’s spare production, augmented by Paule Constable’s forensic lighting and Richard Hammarton’s unsettling score and sound design, Martin is going up the wall. Literally so at one point, when he clambers on top of a wardrobe to reach the hospital bed high above him, which protrudes from the set like a poking tongue. In what appears to be a surrealist sculpture, packets of crisps tumble from their rack in a frozen cascade. Like the baked potato taped to the wall, and the camcorder that Martin turns on the audience in a kind of lo-tech riposte to Ivo van Hove, these turn out to be the building blocks of his neurosis.

At Riverside Studios, London, until 22 February.