No programmes were available – or if there were, there was no attempts by anyone to sell them to a sell out Saturday evening audience. A number of patrons had this as their first visit to Riverside Studios, and if I were one of them, I would have to seriously consider whether I would want to come back – ever. At ten minutes before the published start time, the doors to the studio (there are three) still hadn’t opened, with a member of staff finally materialising, only to bark at people who had quite sensibly gathered close to the doors to ‘move back’. On eventual entry, the studio had numbered seating, except not every seat was clearly marked, leading to confusion and people not entirely sure if they were sat in the right place.
Then the jewel in the crown – a man shouting, “PHOTOS AND VIDEOS ARE NOT ALLOWED!” over and over again. There wasn’t anybody taking pictures of the stage, as far as I could tell, and I increasingly resented being told not to do something I wasn’t even doing. Perhaps the self-appointed Great I AM had decided selfies were not allowed either. Mind you, in hindsight, perhaps the audience deserved to be hollered at anyway: a couple in front just had to keep talking to one another, I was kicked by the man behind me (it is always, to be fair to feminists, nearly always a man – only once, at the Dorfman Theatre at the National, was I kicked from behind by a woman), and a woman in my row persistently kept rustling her plastic bag until I very deliberately took my eyes off the stage altogether and glared at her, and even then her companion had to tell her to stop rustling.
Still, when you’re usually greeted at the theatre by staff who are friendly at best and nonchalant at worst, to be spoken to so rudely (most likely by a member of the production team for this show, and not by Riverside Studios staff) is hardly to going to entice people to come back (even if, as I say, they might not want this particular rabble back in any event). The top price tickets for this production cost £123.50 each, not including booking fees. The lowest, the band I paid, was £35, or £36.50 including fees (sensibly, there is no restoration levy, the venue already having been redeveloped from 2014 to 2019). The top price is more than £1 a minute: this is one of those ninety-minute no-interval affairs.
The production’s website (secondbestplay.com, which I refuse to link to) is a bit shit. “Please accept targeting cookies to watch these videos”, it says, not liking my preference for a morsel of privacy. It claims “Riverside Studios is a 15-minute walk from Hammersmith Broadway Underground Station”. There is no London Underground station called Hammersmith Broadway, and it’s a ten-minute walk from Hammersmith, and even less on the way back if, like me, you just wanted to get out of the venue and back on the Tube pronto.
What of the show? Well, I’m going to be like the little boy who pointed out the emperor has no clothes. Martin Hill, played by Asa Butterfield, ultimately hasn’t had a bad run in life, despite the show’s title. The play is firmly in the realm of First World Problems, or more specifically, given choosing between heating and eating is now a first world problem, Higher Tier First World Problems. They are entirely – and I mean entirely – self-inflicted. There are examples of domestic abuse during Martin’s childhood, but handed opportunities – plural – to put his version of events across, he repeatedly insists nothing is wrong. There’s nowt to be done for someone who won’t help themselves.
Martin’s father, who died before his time (the domestic abuse stemmed from his mother’s subsequent French partner), was a props maker at a film studio, and because his parents divorced, there were times when childcare arrangements fell short, and Martin ended up going to his dad’s workplace. This is how he was spotted as a potential child actor, by someone involved in the casting process. As the story in this ridiculous play would have it, Warner Bros. Pictures decided on casting Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter rather than Martin Hill.
In adulthood, Martin isn’t 100 per cent sure he even wants to be a father, in which case he should have got his tubes tied or used a condom or told his partner to swallow or do whatever it is that men who don’t want to be fathers do. I really had no sympathy for his non-predicament. He had no problem holding down a job, and not only that, a job he wanted and enjoyed, before being promoted to a managerial position. What the hell even was his problem? A not-very-lousy and only temporarily traumatic childhood – which would have been even shorter if he hadn’t lied to his own mother, the little shit – has apparently led to all sorts of issues just because someone else was cast as Harry Potter. Boo hoo. So fucking what.
Some good use is made of the stage space. Butterfield is a good actor, to be fair, and makes the most of this conflicted and bizarre character. But I wasn’t going to risk getting whiplash just because he’s climbed up to the top corner of the stage, from where he speaks at length. In fact, this might as well have been a radio play, as none of the set and props added much to the production (we know what the Mona Lisa looks like, we don’t need a copy of it hanging from an on-stage wall). Oh dear, how sad, never mind, as Windsor Davies used to say.
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