Review Roundup: Jesse Tyler Ferguson in TRU

Directed by the award-winning Rob Ashford, Tru is now open at the Menier Chocolate Factory, following the production’s New York run earlier this year.

It's December 1975 and Truman Capote is alone in his New York apartment, reeling from a crisis that cost him friendship of the elite social circle he adored. Drawn entirely from Capote’s own words, this funny and heartbreaking play is an unflinching portrait of an artist at his breaking point, confronting the consequences of his most scandalous work.

Tru is at the Menier Chocolate Factory until 14 November

Photo Credit: Johan Persson

Clementine Scott, BroadwayWorld: Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s take on Capote elevates him far above caricature, and reveals a facet of the writer different from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning portrayal in the film Capote. This Capote gains sympathy for his lonely melancholy after a lifetime of social climbing, but loses it with his ruthless callousness towards his friends (whom he sorts into the ‘A list’ and ‘B list’). When addressing his scathing, thinly veiled portrayals of the Swans – in a recently published excerpt from his novel Answered Prayers – he is both defensive and despairing.

Mark Lawson, The Guardian: The title Tru has a silent e and question mark. Capote lied about his own life while publishing upsetting truths about others, issues more current than in his own life or this play’s. Here is a particularly frustrating example of an at least five-star performance of an at best three-star script. I’ve split the difference while wishing Tyler Ferguson a different text. A new play about Capote would require him to offer a stronger defence about treacherous use of others’ lives than a Broadway museum piece that sounds oddly light about addiction and betrayal.

Sam Marlowe, The Stage: Tyler Ferguson impeccably catches Capote’s fluting delivery and expansive style, flouncing in, gussied up in fur, purple velvet and fedora, and later lounging in dressing gown and pyjamas. But it’s never clear who he’s talking to, or why – what’s our role in his monologue? Are we in the room with him, or inside his head? He’s accompanied onstage by Charlotte D’Amboise, representing the Swans. Clad in a frothy, tutu-like, translucent ballgown and feathered mask, she strikes balletic poses and briefly lends her voice to figures from Capote’s past.

Andrzej Lukowski, TimeOut: The actual play can’t really live up to the magnificence of the setting. That’s not the fault of performer Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who offers a funny, often very poignant channeling of the Alabama-raised author and socialite. That distinctive voice could so easily fall into parody – it was half a parody already. But Ferguson brings Capote to life, aided by the fact that the play is set at a very painful time in his life. It’s 1975, and he has recently published a chapter of his (ultimately unfinished) magnum opus Answered Prayers, and its savage depiction of the super-rich has spooked much of Capote’s social circle.

Dominic Maxwell, The Times: And if you want to see — or be in — a really fine set, come and be wowed by how the designer Paul Farnsworth has turned the Menier Chocolate Factory in London Bridge into an outsized reimagining of Capote’s brown-and-burgundy New York living room. Sit by bookcases, the lovely rugs, the paperweights, the porcelain cats, the desk and decanters, and knick-knacks galore. Ferguson’s Tru bustles and banters right by you, or may even sit at your table. Remarkable.

Richard Maguire, The Reviews Hub: Jesse Tyler Ferguson, best known for his role in Modern Family, seems born to play the role. His Capote is bitchy, precocious and lonely. Fetching in his fur coat and Panama hat, he confides to his audience, desperate to be liked, but maintaining a childish glee to create shock and scandal. He sees himself as an outsider, not apprehending that he’s embedded as deeply as any other blue-blood in glittering Society.

Nick Curtis, The Standard: Ferguson, slouching and perma-hungover in a racoon coat and white hat, looks little like Capote, who resembled a white-blond, moon-faced, devil child. But he captures his insinuating, conspiratorial prattle and his vaunting self-belief. The actor, who has been making a second home on the London stage latterly, in Stephen Sondheim’s Here We Are and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, almost made me forget how much I dislike soliloquies where a famous character reels off all the touchpoints of his or her life.

Average Rating: 68.6%