Great pretender: Billy Crudup is a revelation in Harry Clarke

That’s also the title of David Cale’s play and it serves as a showcase for the formidable talents of Billy Crudup, an actor probably best known for The Morning Show. He plays a wide range of characters – men as well as women – and it’s a measure of how well he succeeds in each that they ring true. They are all individuals most of us have met in one form or another in our lives.

One of life’s losers, Brugglestein is wandering aimlessly around New York one day when he decides, on the spur of the moment, to follow a complete stranger. When he subsequently meets him, he uses the information he’s gleaned to inveigle himself into his life and that of his family.

He decides his new best mate wouldn’t be attracted to Brugglestein and metamorphoses into Harry Clarke, English, cool and involved in the world of pop music.

Clarke ends up sleeping with him, his sister and his mother and making them all depend upon him. They are clearly all higher up the social pecking order than he is, but – cunning and amoral, rather like Dirk Bogarde in The Servant – Clarke soon establishes his dominance.

I hadn’t been especially aware of Crudup before this show, and finding the way it is described mystifying, I went along to see it with no great expectations. It turned out to be a revelation. This is a funny, witty and highly intelligent piece of work that’s stylishly directed by Leigh Silverman.

It is however uniquely Crudup’s triumph. I doubt any other actor could have made it work. All alone on the stage for 90 minutes, he holds our rapt attention for every one of them, involving us in a story that might seem on the face of it to be preposterous but, with his mastery of each character, seems in the moment to be eminently believable and compulsively watchable.

The word “bravura” is over-used by critics to describe a performance, but for once it’s merited. This is acting of the highest order.