Second Best reviews round-up – Starring Asa Butterfield at Riverside Studios in London

"Asa Butterfield has nowhere to hide in his brave stage debut"

"One-man play 'Second Best' reveals him as a confident and sensitive live actor"

"The lone man – lonely man, for much of the action – doing the talking is Sex Education star Asa Butterfield, who is making his stage debut in a commendably brave, nowhere-to-hide manner. Asa, it turns out, is pretty ace when it comes to performing in front of a live audience."

"The 90 minutes of Second Best make for a slow burn of an evening, with considerable improvement after a sluggish start. The star draw of Butterfield necessitates a venue of a certain size, yet staging-wise this is too small a show for too big a space."

"Butterfield, wearing little round glasses that make him look exactly like you know who, moves confidently around the daunting stage, shifting moods seamlessly between almost-together adult and almost-lost boy in Michael Longhurst’s sensitive production."

"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."

"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.”"

"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."

"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"

"Asa Butterfield is first-class as Harry Potter runner-up"

"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."

"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"

"Making his stage debut, Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield whooshes the action along, moving economically between characters (his switch to playing Martin’s stepfather is all in the shoulders) and exuding a charm that is never ingratiating. Indeed, there is real finesse in his ability to inhabit a man who is in need without seeming needy. Parts of this one-person play could be fortified and fleshed-out, but no one could apply its title to his performance."

"Promising debut for Asa Butterfield as Harry Potter reject"

"Butterfield makes his stage debut with a performance that is part-stand up, part-trauma dump, as he plays a man who once just missed out on being 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."

"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."

"‘Sex Education’ star Asa Butterfield makes a superb stage debut as a man haunted by the fact he was almost cast as Harry Potter as a child"

"You’d be fair to think that the association with childhood screen success might make Butterfield slightly odd casting for Martin - but he gives a totally assured and searing performance. And besides, he apparently lost the role of Spider-Man to Tom Holland. He is the nucleus of Michael Longhurst’s barebones production"

"Things finish a little bit too neatly with Norris’ reflections on how fame restricts freedom feeling trite. The character of Martin’s dedicated partner Sophie needs filling out. But for Butterfield this is a triumph. An actor with less talent would have been exposed by Longhurst’s demanding direction -Butterfield is simply magic."

"Asa Butterfield shines in a poignant Harry Potter tale"

"The Sex Education star makes his stage debut with a leap into the deep end, telling the story of a man who was agonisingly close to being cast as the wizard"

"Barney Norris’s script — based on a novella by the French writer David Foenkinos — explores obsessive thoughts about the road not taken. Butterfield, better known as the awkward Otis Milburn in the TV series, is very assured"

"If the piece, busily directed by Michael Longhurst, has a flaw, it’s that the narrative is a little too knowingly Gallic, too eager to toy with ideas and clever images rather than persuading us that the Anglo-French Martin is a fully rounded human being."

"Still, Butterfield’s genial performance — he has chosen to make his stage debut with a leap into the deep end — keeps those doubts at bay much of the time."

"Wry charm"

"Asa Butterfield is a riveting storyteller in his stage debut, playing a fictional runner-up to Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe"

"... directed here with frankness and wry charm by former Donmar Warehouse boss Michael Longhurst."

"This one-person play marks Butterfield’s stage debut and he proves himself a fantastic storyteller, lending Martin a self-deprecating humour that prevents the whole thing running like a tedious, ‘poor me’ monologue."

"Second Best: A Netflix star makes an assured debut as the boy who was nearly Harry Potter"

"Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield holds his own in this adroit staging of the best-selling novel about a man who just missed out on stardom"

"Asa Butterfield has made a canny and bold choice for his stage acting debut at the age of 27: an adroit, pertinent adaptation of the best-selling 2023 novel by French author David Foenkinos which, taking its fictional cue from remarks made by a casting director, imagines the life of an ordinary boy who narrowly missed out on being cast as Harry Potter. Irony! Butterfield wouldn’t be treading the boards solo in the Riverside Studios’ main house if he hadn’t been a child star himself"

"... the beauty of Foenkinos’s parable for our age of fame-hunger is that the Potter phenomenon was so extreme that it intensifies the notion of a potential but then forfeited life-changing event to the point of universality."

"Barney Norris’s script serves the light and shade of the story well even if the need to relay events in adult retrospect diminishes the immediacy of a child’s formative experiences."

"This talented debutant admirably holds his own, but perhaps paces about too much – less can be more in a monologue and he’s not really given the chance to show much versatility here. Still, from fairly unprepossessing beginnings, he toils away to earn our affection and sympathy."

"Asa Butterfield excels as the boy who was nearly Harry Potter"

"Adapted from a French bestseller, this fictional story of Martin, who missed out on the role of a lifetime, becomes a meditation on how lives are changed"

"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."

"Both the play and its execution excel here, evoking the jangling errors of association that hardwire in the traumatised mind well into adulthood."