The Royal Albion Theatre has eleven weeks left to live. Unfortunately, everyone has a plan to save it.

Julian Candle has spent thirty-five years being indispensable without ever becoming important. He has played fools, gravediggers, servants, corpses and men whose chief dramatic function is to enter carrying news. When the crumbling Royal Albion Theatre discovers it may not survive another season, Julian expects another crisis, another meeting and probably another unpaid rehearsal.

Instead, salvation arrives in the shape of Sir Crispin Rowe — knighted national treasure, television institution and former Albion actor — returning to play King Lear in a supposedly revolutionary production designed to secure a £1.8 million cultural grant.

Julian is cast as the Fool.

And Lear's understudy.

What follows is a magnificently ill-advised collision of celebrity, artistic ambition, corporate sponsorship, consultants, community engagement, funding targets, social media, local politics and actors who can turn even an existential financial crisis into an argument about casting.

But behind the inspirational language and “transformative opportunities,” Julian begins to suspect that somebody may be planning a very different future for the Royal Albion — one in which the theatre's failure is not an accident, but the desired outcome.

To save the company that has defined his life, the eternal understudy may finally have to do the one thing nobody expects of him:

take centre stage.

The Second-Best Actors in England is a sharp, affectionate and gloriously theatrical satire about ageing, ambition, celebrity, arts funding, institutional absurdity and the strange collection of egos required to put on a play.

Because in the theatre, everyone believes in equality — until the parts are read.