Tru: Jesse Tyler Ferguson excels as a waspish Truman Capote

Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Truman Capote) - (Johan Persson)

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”.