Review: Catcher ****

In his lifetime, John Lennon spawned thousands of column inches, dozens of biographies and inspired a peculiar kind of loyalty among his fans. In death, he joined that select league of icons forever remembered as the brightest of talents prematurely snuffed out.

On December 8, 1980 Lennon was shot dead at the entrance of the Dakota apartment building in New York. His killer was Mark David Chapman, a man obsessed by The Catcher in the Rye and who said he killed Lennon to help promote Salinger's book.

Suffering from delusions, it's known the evening before the killing Chapman called a prostitute to his hotel room and in the early hours of the morning she left.

Catcher, the new play by Richard Hurford for York company Pilot Theatre, fills in those intervening hours and gives the anonymous woman a name and a story of her own.

Ronan Summers delivers a powerful performance as Chapman, moving seamlessly from a lonely misunderstood man, who just wants to talk to a prostitute, to the deranged lunatic who believes he is in charge of an invisible race he calls the little people.

The close confines of the theatre's Basement Studio lends a suitably claustrophobic atmosphere to the production, but it is the sharp script and faultless acting which distinguish Catcher from much new theatre. Against Summers' disturbing portrait of Chapman, stands Mitzi Jones. It is she who takes the audience back to the hotel room 20 years earlier where she was Chapman's call girl and who in the present day muses on the price of fame and the cost of celebrity.

Catcher may only run to an hour and a quarter, but it packs more punches than many productions twice that length. Tense, disturbing and utterly compelling, this may be theatre in miniature, but it's also perfectly formed.