Sean Hayes is flawless in his West End debut
8 / 10
Hayes inhabits his role so completely and with such detail that he’s equal parts mesmerising and painful to watch. He nails flawlessly the fluttering hands and slack-jawed terror of a person living on their very last nerve, the obsessive-compulsive tics that make sense to him but nobody else, the acidic wit as self-deprecating as it is mean (“I’m controversial, they either dislike me…or they hate me”). It’s a stunning performance that reaches its apotheosis in the production’s ultimate coup de theatre: like Levant, Hayes is an accomplished concert pianist and, at the show’s climax, he plays a driven, enthralling version of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” that seems to represent Oscar channeling and exorcising all his demons at once.
