IT is not too late to catch Catcher in its world premiere at York Theatre Royal, staged by company-in-residence Pilot Theatre.

Richard Hurford’s play is a study of the fatal attraction of fame and obsession that interweaves the lives of Beatle John Lennon, his killer Mark Chapman and Holden Caulfield, the fictional anxious teenager in JD Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, whose story so influenced Chapman’s deeds.

A fourth figure is present too: the prostitute ordered up by Chapman in his hotel room on his last night before the bullets and fame struck. By contrast with Chapman, she faded away, never to be seen again.

“At the route of the story is the idea of becoming a somebody,” says Ronan Summers, the American-Irish actor making his Theatre Royal debut in the role of Chapman.

“In my opinion, Mark Chapman was a someone because he’d done work overseas in the Lebanon; he’d already worked in hospital as a carer and a Vietnamese resettlement camp for displaced children, so he was somebody, and he had affected people’s lives for good, and yet he didn’t consider himself a somebody because no-one knew his name.”

Times have changed since that fateful December day in 1980, as director Suzann McLean notes. “It’s changed because people used to be happy to build a home and raise kids, and now you have to be somebody,” she says. “If you put your name in Google and nothing comes up, then you’re a nobody. If there’s something there, then you’re a somebody.”

Ronan rejoins: “The Eighties was when it started to change. It used to be that to be famous you had to have a skill, but then there was this idea that you could just be a celebrity and not do anything.

“But for Chapman, there was an abuse of trust by Lennon, who he saw as having become phoney – and that’s where the Catcher In The Rye story comes in, as he felt he had to show the world that it had to change, after he read the book.”

For Suzann, there is no problem in presenting a speculative play; the theme is what matters. “I can do all the research I did on Chapman but I’ll never know the real Mark Chapman. But at the same time, who is the real Suzann McLean? We are who we are in that moment.

“A lot of what Mark Chapman has said has been contradictory, but I want to find a truth in the play. The story is more relevant today than if it had been written in the Eighties because we’ve really grown into a world where everyone wants their minute of fame and it seems it’s not enough just to live and exist.”


• Catcher, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until June 5. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk