Good Night, Oscar review – Tony-winning Sean Hayes exudes awkward brilliance and pathos as a troubled pianist

Hot on the heels of hit Broadway play Stereophonic, there’s another evocative recording studio period piece in town. But where Stereophonic is an epic, following a Seventies-era band gradually spiralling as they spend months cutting a record, Good Night, Oscar is a miniature that’s set on an explosive single night. In a tight 100 minutes, it follows troubled Hollywood character actor, pianist, and comedian Oscar Levant on his last ever telly appearance. In a Tony Award-winning performance, its star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) drenches this role in pathos and awkward brilliance, his sharp edges and jagged nerves rubbing uncomfortably against the smooth patter of a 1958 episode of Tonight Starring Jack Paar.

Playwright Doug Wright is clearly captivated by his subject, but UK audiences might not be too familiar with Levant: the brilliant musician who Hollywood plugged into bit parts in any number of golden age musicals in need of a piano man who could talk. In his later years, Levant found his voice, and it was much more complicated than showbiz made room for. In a series of TV interviews between 1963 and 1964, he talked frankly about his institutionalisations, electroshock treatment and addiction to prescription pills. Were these probing public conversations ethical? “It is a form of therapy for him,” said telly host Paar, reassuring a no doubt queasy live audience. Wright reproduces that line here, but it feels even less convincing.

He’s created a fictionalised, deeply implausible, and deliberately uncomfortable scenario here, where Levant is dragged from a psychiatric hospital to the TV studio after his wife June (Rosalie Craig), kept his illness a secret from his agent. Here, Paar (Ben Rappaport) is motivated by loyalty to his longstanding friend and co-star – but also by something a bit more unpalatable. He’s excited by the danger Levant brings to broadcasts, deliberately goading him to drop his brilliantly edgy jokes about sex, politics and religion live on air, as the public hangs on his every word, waiting for the next bombshell to land. “Strip away the phoney tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath,” he says, eviscerating the industry that made him famous.

As Wright’s play emphasises, Levant’s worldview was ahead of its time – and so were the people who hired him, presaging an era of reality TV where uninhibited, unself-aware participants are wheeled on to scandalise viewers, with little thought given to the toll it takes on them. Still, this drama doesn’t feel quite as forward-looking in its perspective on mental illness. Levant’s madness here is romanticised, stylised: his hallucinations are used as a convenient way to flesh out his backstory. There’s something of a debt to Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus here, with its tale of an ageing composer haunted by his more successful rival, Mozart. Levant sees visions of a sleekly suited George Gershwin, who taunts his loyal disciple and imprisons him in an identity as a favoured interpreter of “Rhapsody in Blue”, nothing more.

This play’s exposition-heavy early scenes move slowly. But once recording starts, director Lisa Peterson’s lavishly drawn period piece comes alive. Hayes unleashes a virtuoso piano performance in which all his torment spills out over the keys, his passionate playing sapping him and sustaining him all at once. And his delivery of Levant’s many real-life one-liners is artful too: “What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left,” he pronounces dolefully, without a trace of pride.

Quips like these seem revealing, but they’re a facade too, a trick. Unfortunately, Wright falls for their charms too often, using them to structure key scenes: an exchange between Hayes and Craig is all jokes, making it hard to see the strange, deep connection between this erratic husband and his ever-loyal wife. This play might be satirising the media world that exploited and destroyed Levant, but it nonetheless falls into the same trap – of delivering a glimmering, beguiling surface without looking too hard at what’s going on underneath.

At the Barbican until 21 September