Sherlock star captivates with haunting solo performance

Theatre Sea Wall Old Vic

★★★★★

London is being treated to a glorious midsummer of haunting – exquisitely performed – oneperson shows. At the Royal Court, Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field is in its final week, as is My Name Is Lucy Barton, featuring a tour de force by Laura Linney, at the Bridge. Now at the Old Vic, Andrew Scott, who mesmerised the nation as Moriarty in the BBC series Sherlock, is treading the boards in a monologue he first performed 10 years ago.

Good stalls seats cost £40 (double that for a premium package) for a show that lasts just half an hour.

But questions of “value for money” are fast dispelled as Scott, casually dressed, paces a bare stage, under harsh lights, against a backdrop of nothingness. He acclimatises us to his presence with smiles and glances before he speaks; when he does, he fixes us in a state of such rapt attention that it’s as if each and every onlooker is getting a private audience.

Scott plays a photographer called Alex, who sets a scene of gilded domesticity, blurring past and present – a beloved wife, Helen, a cherished daughter, Lucy, and an ex-military father-in-law whose idyllic South of France pile afforded dreamy vacations.

But there’s a nightmare beneath the surface of the initial anecdotage, as dark and terrifying as the water that swirls above the deep drop of the sea bed (“sea wall”) he hadn’t known existed, until shown it. Seldom has an extended soliloquy moved with such vertiginous, gut-wrenching speed from a place of apparent fulfilment to something so emptied-out.

What has happened to his daughter leaves Alex in a place no parent wants to be in, where no words suffice and yet, like Coleridge’s guilt-racked Ancient Mariner, words are all that is left. Scott seems to disintegrate before your eyes, and brings tears to them.

Until June 30. Tickets: 0844 871 7628; oldvictheatre.com