Game of Thrones star offers dazzling tour de force on the Chichester stage

Chichester Festival Theatre’s 2020 season was swept away by the pandemic. But now another of its lost treasures, following South Pacific last year, has finally reached the shore – The Narcissist, a brilliant new work by American playwright Christopher Shinn which offers everything you could possibly want in a new drama. It’s provocative, it’s stimulating, it’s demanding, it’s occasionally hard work but it’s also hugely rewarding, poignant in the end and richly relevant – the tale of a political adviser whose own personal crisis out-trumps the disaster of Trump’s 2016 election.

Game of Thrones star Harry Lloyd (and yep, it’s name-checked – he was Viserys Targaryen in the first season of the HBO series) is electrifying as Jim, a guy everyone needs including a potential future president, but a guy who can preach only despair. Lloyd’s is a performance of remarkable skill, persuasion and fluency as we are drawn into his world, a world where everyone is texting him (cleverly conveyed through lit pods above and either side of the stage). Lloyd gives us a Jim holding multiple conversations at once; his changes in intonation are terrific.

But as his personal life collapses around him (his wife has gone, his brother is in crisis, his brother’s druggie girlfriend won’t leave and a new lover comes with plenty of complications), the key confrontation comes in the second half after a first half which leaves you wondering just how on earth it is all going to come together. But in Josh Seymour’s assured production, come together it certainly does in the enthralling, sparkling exchange between Jim and The Senator (first rate from Claire Skinner) who is mining his knowledge of politics to assess her presidential chances.

The fascination, though, is that she sticks to her guns. She sees hope and optimism; she is convinced that we all start from a point of innocence. Jim, however, sees apathy and despair – and insists that plugging into the misery of people, their anger and their sheer self-centredness is the way to get elected.

She’s hanging on for a better future; he’s hanging on to see the politicians get precisely what they deserve. She believes in the possibility of proper human interaction; he sees only our total dependence on the fragmented, warped world we see through our phones.

And it is brilliantly done, not least for the way they impact on each other which is, in the end of course, the crux of the play. Shinn has given us a deeply absorbing meditation not just on politics but also on our approach to pretty much everything, not least the way we communicate with each other. Fine direction and a superb cast bring it to life quite dazzlingly in a second half that rewards the patience the first half demands. The result is that best kind of drama, the kind that stays with you, that you will mull over in the car on the way home and then probably wake up thinking about the next morning.