Review The Entertainer

The Entertainer

by John Osborne

The End Of The Pier Show

http://www.nimaxtheatres.com/garrick-theatre/the_entertainer/

When music hall declined in post Second World War Britain, it wasn't just shows and venues that were lost. A whole economic infrastructure of halls linked by the railway network, agents, theatrical digs and a communal experience was also ousted.

Written by John Osborne at the age of 27, The Entertainer charts the dying days of veteran Archie Rice's (Kenneth Branagh) musical hall and end-of-the-pier act on to which he has tacked on a nude revue to keep the punters coming.

Archie lives hand-to-mouth, a boarding house life on the circuit with his second wife Phoebe ( a magnificently blowsy and touching Greta Scaatchi) and his son Frank (Jonah Hauer-King), who has served a prison sentence for refusing compulsory military conscription. His daughter Jean (Sophie McShera) from Archie's first wife lives in London where she has become involved, on what seems to be a naive basis, in left wing politics.

Alongside their crumbling existence  is one of Britain's last doomed imperial military adventures in 1956 to stop the nationalization of the Suez Canal leading to the capture of the couple's son in the conflict, the more obediently conscripted Mick, while serving his country.

The set designed by Christopher Oram encloses the family's domestic space in a dilapidated music hall. Director Rob Ashford also chooses to blend stylizations from TV and film, music hall's nemeses, seeping into the family drama. This may well work on screen but, in terms of this play, sits more uneasily in a theatre.

So the showgirls are Billy Cotton glamour girls and Archie himself is reminiscent of a toned Gene Kelly rather than a seedy roué. Nonetheless, it's one interpretation, and one which may pay dividends when the show is broadcast on Thursday 27th October.

But we were not sure it does justice on stage to the structure of Osborne's play, surely a forerunner of shows such as Oh! What A Lovely War. The satire of The Entertainer also predates the raft of 1960s satire with Beyond The Fringe and That Was The Week That Was.  

It did strike us that in 1956 the name Archie was perhaps most readily associated with the popular radio ventriloquist doll Archie Andrews. 

This may give a way into the Brechtian variety show sequences and Archie's proclamation that he is "dead behind the eyes". It. even intersects with Osborne's Archie's love life with both the dummy and the entertainer with much younger girlfriends.  

Most of all, this turns Archie's performances, his set piece misogyny and racism into grotesque mouthpieces, inherited it seems partly from his father Billy (Gawn Grainger) who may also be the one with the connections and management skills.

There are moments of  power, especially in the second act when the fate of soldier son Mick resonates strongly with our times. But, although it is in the script, there is little sense of a family and entertainment industry caught in an unholy trap, a mirror of fractured global politics and ideologies.

In the end, this feels like a too controlled and manicured production rather than a deadly Cold War Swiftian dart.There's more to be mined here and it's an amber light from TLT and her automotive music hall stooge.

Review A Subject Of Scandal And Concern

A Subject of Scandal and Concern

by John Osborne

Our Daily Bread

www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk 

Nearly twenty years before an English jury found a magazine editor guilty of blasphemy and almost fifty years before the abolition of blasphemy as an offence, John Osborne wrote a TV screenplay, A Subject of Scandal and Concern directed by Tony Richardson for the BBC Sunday Night Play in 1960, first produced for the stage in Notthingham two years later.  

Osborne had looked at contemporary documents on the case of socialist lecturer George Holyoake (Jamie Muscato), the last person jailed in 1842 for blasphemy in England and, from them, fashioned this play. This is no The Crucible, but deliberately so. It is a carefully measured series of snapshot scenes  from days leading up and during the trial and imprisonment of  Holyoake.

As presented in the play, Holyoake is a self-educated man, carefully spoken but a stammerer, who was somewhat uneasily linked with reformer Robert Owen. He is poorly renumerated for his pains giving lectures travelling from parish to parish. His starving wife (Caroline Moroney) and child, like many others caught up in the upheaval of the industrial revolution, are on the poverty line and have to lodge with her sister.

Holyoake doggedly pursues his lecture schedule including a talk in Cheltenham on  "Home Colonization, Emigration and the Poor Law" where he is ambushed by a question on man's  duty to God from the audience, a ready-made story for the local press, although Holyoake, an atheist, is reluctant to touch on any matter related to religion.

This is a sweetly-short hour-long play intelligently and fluently directed by Jimmy Walters with an equally ingeniously simple set of wooden benches and stone walls from designer Philip Lindley matching the fluid staging and scene changes (choreographer Ste Clough). 

Osborne's script also manages to allay possible accusations of a chattering classes' play on a working-class story by a careful structure with a modern-day lawyer narrator (Doron Davidson)  giving "information" and by the end, a touch of  irony.

It sent this journeyman critic, and car companion, as well to Google to look up Holyoake who turned out to be more esconced in the rivalries of  newspapers and political reform than the bare dramatic facts of the play want to state.

In the play we see a dramatically satisfying  predicament of a man who can find no way out but to answer with logic and coherence. A man who discovers himself abandoned to magistrate (Richard Shanks) and jury, with local newspaper printer and journalist in tow,  determined to maintain the power of the church and parish.

It is also curiously satisfying to complete the jigsaw with our own research, the main pieces already put in place by the play. Something which, even before geeks at the Rand Corporation began experimenting with the internet, was maybe the aim of the playwright. 

For, incredible as it seems ;), people at the time the play was written and broadcast used buildings where they could borrow books including reference tomes, some still not available on the internet but still to be found in print form in libraries, if the books and buildings have not been sold off.  

Interestingly, the late film critic Philip French also pointed out that in the 1960s stammering became fashionable in plays as a sign of integrity versus silver tongued liars and fraudsters.  So  documentary plays and protagonists with speech impediments were part of a general trend.  

But as has been noted on our blog several times, the playwriting world itself was still subject to the Lord Chamberlain's edict. And the welfare state (as Elvis Costello noted in the lyrics of Let Him Dangle) did not extend to abolition of the death penalty. So this combination of canny popularism, political activism and the ability to pique our curiosity makes for a fulfilling hour.

In an age where our state institutions are increasingly fragmented seemingly on a local basis, many would say creating a commercial maze with a loss of  accountability, the deceptively straightforward and artful structure of this play encapsulates a tangle of still relevant issues Even perhaps a ready-made historical subject for Ken Loach? A green light for a short play with a long reach.