The Entertainer

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Play closed 26 May 2007

Old Vic Theatre The Cut, Waterloo, London

A major revival of John Osborne's classic play The Entertainer in London starring Robert Lindsay and Pam Ferris and directed by Sean Holmes, presented to mark the play's 50th anniversary.

"Brilliant entertainment in a play for our times" The Guardian

In The Entertainer Archie Rice is a struggling comedian, a music-hall performer in an age when music halls had all but disappeared. Driven by dreams of stardom and a desperation to equal his father's success, Archie finds himself a man out of his time - a selfish, deceitful has-been, headlining a tacky revue in a rundown seaside town. Family tensions rise to a boil as he shamelessly cheats on his wife and tricks his dying father into financing one last revue. But throughout it all, Archie jigs and jabbers before his ever-diminishing audience and does whatever it takes to keep the show going.

"It is impossble to praise Robert Lindsay's magnificent star performance too highly"
The Daily Telegraph

The cast of The Entertainer features Robert Lindsay as 'Archie Rice' and Pam Ferris as his wife. The cast also includes Jim Creighton, Emma Cunniffe, David Dawson, Lyndsey Lennon, Andrew McDonald and David Baron. John Normington had to withdraw from this production in April on his doctor's advice due to ill health.

"Pam Ferris is magnificent" The Independent

"Soldiers are dying in the Middle East; people have lost confidence in the Prime Minister and are wondering what they're fighting for. That's the world in which John Osborne's remarkable state-of-the-nation play The Entertainer is set. Fifty years on, its resonance startles... Sean Holmes's intense, authentic revival brilliantly captures the spirit - or lack of it - of the time, and revelas it to be more than a star vehicle (first made famous by Laurence Olivier); there are several richly written characters, all whom are brought to vivid and desperate life... You won't find finer acting anywhere on the London stage." The Mail on Sunday

"From the moment Robert Lindsay walks on to do Archie Rice's terrible shtick, you can see it is a role that is utterly his. He doesn't so much bury Olivier's performance as praise it, using his ghost as a prop... The bleak truth of Rice is that he is irredeemable — a cheap Faust who has frittered his soul away on draught Bass and grim rutting on the sofa. There is no glimmer of a moral here. And Lindsay nails it with a dead eye... The writing is spat across the stage in great gobbets, spews of bile, indignation and brilliant observation. The play is too long, lumpy and awkward, but it's vital and real and profound." The Sunday Times

"Of course, John Osborne's The Entertainer has always been a strongly structured play about a performer falling apart on and off stage, dying on his feet as a funnyman and simultaneously serving as a symbol of the jaded British Empire. But Sean Holmes's superb production startlingly reminds you just how fine a modern classic this is. Not only has it stood the test of half a century as a period piece, it also seems painfully timely all over again." The Independent on Sunday

"Robert Lindsay [as Archie Rice] actually had the audience guffawing at his vaudeville routines and his jokes... Osborne had, however, intended the jokes to be as tired as Rice himself. This was a man who 'doesn't give a damn about anything' and who was 'dead behind the eyes', and yet Lindsay's eyes glowed brightly throughout the performance... This throws the production somewhat off balance, but for fans of Osborne there is still much to savour in Sean Holmes's earnest and conscientious three-hour-long production." The Sunday Telegraph

Set in the mid-1950s, The Entertainer takes place in a large coastal resort. The house where the Rice family live is one of those tall ugly monuments built by a prosperous business man at the beginning of the century. Only twenty-five minutes drive to the sea front. Now, trolley buses hum past the front drive, full of workers from the small factories that have grown up round about. This is a part of the town the holiday makers never see - or, if they do, they decide to turn back to the pleasure gardens. This is what they have spent two or three hours in a train to escape. They don't even have to pass it on their way in from the central station, for this is a town on its own, and it has its own station, quite a large one, with acres of goods sheds and shunting yards. However, the main line trains don't stop there. It is not residential, it is hardly industrial. It is full of dirty blank spaces, high black walls, a gas holder, a tall chimney, a main road that shakes with dust and lorries. The shops are scattered at the corners of narrow streets. A newsagent's, a general grocer's, a fish-and-chip shop - this is the setting for The Entertainer...

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen - Archie Rice is the name. Archie Rice. Mrs. Rice's favourite boy. We're going to entertain you for the next two and a half hours and you've really had it now. All the exit doors locked. Talking about being locked in, some of these people ought to be locked up. Locked up. They did, honest - I know what you're waiting for. I know what you're waiting for and who isn't? Just keep your peckers up - they'll be on in a minute. You've got to put up with me first. And now - now, to open the show. I'm going to sing a little song I wrote myself. I hope you like it...

Why should I care? Why should I let it touch me!
Why shouldn't I, sit down and try to let it pass over me?
Why should they stare. Why should I let it get me?
What's the use of despair, if they call you a square?
You're a long time dead - Like my pal Fred,
So why, oh why should I bother to care?...

John Osborne was one of the 20th century's most celebrated playwrights and the original 'angry young man'. Following the success of Look Back in Anger, he continued to examine the state of the country in The Entertainer, this time using three generations of a family of entertainers to symbolise the decline of post-war Britain.