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 The Painkiller

The Painkiller

by Francis Veber adapted by Sean Foley

A Shot In The Arm

http://www.branaghtheatre.com/the-painkiller

An assassin hired to take out a gangster trial witness  in one hotel room and a man deserted by his wife about to take his own life  in the next - this could be the dramatic premise of a film noir beloved of French cinema.

But throw in a camp hotel porter, a snobbish wife and psychiatrist lover complete with hypodermic needle, a policeman in the cupboard and throw a character out of the window - and what do you have, but French farce?

Originally written in 1969 by Francis Veber, the stage farce Le Contrat (The Contract) by 1973 became hit film L'Emmerdeur (A Pain In The Arse), then remade in English as Billy Wilder's last film, Buddy Buddy, before the writer himself revamped it in a new stage and film version in 2005 and 2008 respectively.

It's the last version to which director Sean Foley seems to have given an English setting and mildly updated for The Painkiller, first seen at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast in 2011, and now part of the season run by Kenneth Branagh and his theatre company.

Branagh himself takes the role of the hitman who finds adjoining hotel rooms the equivalent of a pair of handcuffs as his fate is bound up with that of local newspaper photographer Dudley (Rob Brydon).

And just as film noir can be taken down by French farce, the life of the suave assassin (whose name, we eventually learn, is Ralph) can be thrown into disarray and overwhelmed by the failed suicide and cuckold provincial in the neighbouring room.

While French farce is by its nature a self-conscious exercise - who else but the French would expend so much intellectual exertion and exact mathematics on coming up with a credible way for powerful men to lose their trousers? - TLT and her own manacled automobile were not wholly convinced by this anglicized piece.

Branagh makes an elegant, precise Ralph, a thoroughbred stallion brought down by a pack horse, as he lurches physically and mentally from one cover up to another, from one dose of ketamine to a dose of amphetamines ...

And Brydon's Dudley as the little guy is a suitable catalyst for chaos as the Maison des Lits turns into Chienlit, ably supported by Claudie Blakley as his adulterous and social-climbing wife Michelle, Alex MacQueen as her domineering syringe-happy psychiatrist lover, Mark Hadfield as the camp hotel porter and Marcus Fraser as the plain clothes policeman drawn into the hotel fray.

However with its mane shorn of its colonial past, part-militarised police force and aristocratic pretensions within a republic, we wondered whether the farce had lost some of its logic, political bite and, yes, excruciating but cathartic pain in this British adaptation.

And at  the moment it doesn't seem to have entirely found yet its frenetic farce rhythm and needs some speedier playing. But with this fixable reservation, at 90 minutes without a break with some elegant visuals and a cast of fine actors, it still held the attention throughout. An amber light from TLT.