Tru: Jesse Tyler Ferguson excels as a waspish Truman Capote

Come for Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s waspish performance as Truman Capote, stay for Paul Farnsworth’s magnificent, immersive set. In Rob Ashford’s staging of Jay Presson Allen’s almost-monologue, the audience is seated around a sumptuous evocation of the writer and social gadfly’s overstuffed New York apartment.

We’re fleetingly acknowledged as he gossips and kvetches on the phone or into a tape recorder for his biographer. He’s haunted by The Swan (Charlotte d’Amboise), a lean and chiffon-skirted avatar of the wealthy society women he befriended and has just betrayed, in a 1975 Esquire excerpt of his never-finished tell-all novel. This is an extremely clumsy device, but it does mean the programme carries a delicious credit for a “standby swan”.

Allen’s play, written in 1991, is a none-too-subtle example of the tendency of America’s elites and American showbiz endlessly to mythologise and re-devour themselves, an orgy of name-dropping and snobbery. It charts Capote’s rise as an unloved but precocious child of a divorcee in Monroeville, Alabama, to literary stardom that bought him entry to Manhattan’s haute monde. It also notes the destructive impulse in a writer’s life, which led “Tru” to detonate relationships on and off the page, and addle himself with alcohol and other intoxicants.

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.

Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Truman Capote), Charlotte d’Amboise (The Swan)

Johan Persson

Still, if we’re going to have such a show, Capote (“Cap-OH-dee,” he fussily corrects one interlocutor) offers abundant material. “I’ve lived an extraordinary life and I knew everyone,” he declares early on, and he’s right. Tru supposedly tap-danced with Louis Armstrong, knew RFK and JFK *and* their killers, and goes disco dancing on cocaine with Ava Gardner at Studio 54.

He could master a Maserati, was a crack shot, could read upside down - or so he claims. His homosexuality was “always right out there” at a time when this was brave, and he maintained a non-exclusive relationship with his lover Jack Dunphy for three decades. (If you find yourself in the front row of Tru’s salon here, you may be flirted with.)

The early literary landmarks of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood are namechecked, of course, along with the now-legendary Black and White Ball he hosted at NY’s Plaza Hotel in 1966. The implication is that Tru squandered his true talent as a novelist and a pioneer of the New Journalism for parties and fripperies. He seethes here at being blackballed and he’s fussy about objects and décor. The play takes place just before Christmas and quite a lot of comedy is wrung from Capote’s horror at the “veritable horse-trough of unspeakable poinsettias” he’s been sent.

Presson Allen, whose credits include the dramatisation and screenplay of The Prime of Miss Jean Broadie and the filmscript for Cabaret, captures Capote’s way with a gimlet one-liner. “I went to Staten Island once,” he marvels, amid a roll-call of his travels. “It was like Australia!” For every year spent in California “you lose 30 points off your IQ”. But the narrative is aimless, descending into moony reminiscences of Tru’s childhood friendship with his aunt, the time he first got drunk at seven and was bitten by a cottonmouth snake aged eight.

Charlotte d’Amboise’s Swan, who has had little to do but flash her legs and scapulae, and don and doff a carnival mask and a beaded top that looks like a carbonised ribcage, is enlisted to waltz him awkwardly off the stage. We, in turn, go out whistling the set.