THE ENTERTAINER. To 24 May.
Derby
THE ENTERTAINER
by John Osborne Music by John Addison
Derby Playhouse To 24 May 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 17 May 2.30pm
Audio-described 17 May 2.30pm, 21 May
BSL Signed 17 May 2.30pm 22 May
Backchat discussion 22 May
Runs 2hr 45 min One interval
TICKETS: 01332 363275
Minicom: 01332 547209
www.derbyplayhouse.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 1 May
Another typical Freeman compound of irritating brilliance.Despite the 1950s Pathe News extracts and headlines of the Suez crisis whirled at us by modern video technology, David Freeman’s spare, intense production shows The Entertainer not as period piece but an intense, near-existential drama. Archie Rice onstage may be the last desperate fling of music-hall tradition – currently touring to the ‘Empire’ naturally – just as Suez was the final, disillusioning thrust of a faded English imperial dream. Offstage, this sozzled failure's the ironic 1957 follow-up to the previous year’s Jimmy Porter: an angry old man with no good cause.
Freeman makes state of the nation comment integral to Archie’s self-destruction; it’s lost Empires all round. Archie’s opening patter is replaced with a glimpse of him arranging his posing Britannia. The nude Britannia tableau has grown to a threesome by the time it’s revealed, just after Jean, played by Anna Tolputt as a duffel-coated would-be radical who’s lost her ideals at a Trafalgar Square rally, has toasted the Queen with ironic enthusiasm.
The posing women are still lightly draped, saluting figures of the armed forces. Twice they reappear, each time more revealing, in a desperate attempt to tempt the punters not to stay away, till they finally desert Archie’s crumbling, alcohol-dissolved act, leaving him to sing ‘Thank God I’m normal’ dressed as a plaited-hair schoolgirl. The joke’s on him.
His act’s already bound up with life. Post-interval he’s straight on with a savage misogynist routine about his wife, stretching back to the vicious attack on Phoebe in the preceding scene. The veritas in Archie’s vino (or draught Bass – he’s all ways a bitter man) vomits up in this loudmouthed bullying
Yet Anna Keaveney’s Phoebe, fully aware of her husband’s philanderings – if not the way he drunkenly looms like a sexual predator over his daughter Jean - can survive his verbal onslaught to join in a laugh; the shared laughter of the marital damned found in Strindberg’s Dance of Death and Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Among the production’s finest moments is the one where Phoebe, passing through laughter to deeper agony, transfers her fury at Archie to his dad Billy, dashing the cake she’d proudly bought for son Mick’s expected return from the Middle East because the old man’s stolen a slice. It's anger triggered by Billy, but fuelled by Archie and his women.
Irritations? The device of characters talking over each other's come along since Osborne and his dialogue's not made for it (unlike certain sections of Caryl Churchill, whose Top Girls created this tactic). Freeman uses it to create a sense of melee but individual lines become submerged.
Robert David MacDonald (Glasgow Citizens' getting demob.-happy?) as Billy is often cast at the side, a curmudgeonly old irrelevance. The sense of the old trouper dredged up by Archie to bring in audiences who remember the old man's glory days goes missing - though Freeman acutely uses an image of Billy, forced back into action and dying onstage, offset against headlines of Britain drawing out of Suez.
Intelligence and acuity make Freeman's work well worth seeing – far more so than the more effortful Glasgow production a couple of months back. And there's David Threlfall's Archie to clinch the deal. Ageing and grey, dead behind the eyes and with a hole at the centre of a large, beating heart. Fascinating on stage even when he's awful, repulsive offstage, in a whirling, senseless world - and nation – that's lost its centre.
Billy Rice: Robert David MacDonald
Jean Rice: Anna Tolputt
Archie Rice: David Threlfall
Phoebe Rice: Anna Keaveney
Frank Rice: Dominic Charles-Rouse
Director: David Freeman
Designer: Tom Phillips
Lighting: Alistair Grant
Video: Kit Lane, David Phillips
Musical Director: Kelvin Towse
2003-05-05 11:38:46