The Entertainer
Playwright: John Osborne Director: Rob Ashford
Garrick, London WC2 (0330-333 4811) Until 12 November Running time: 2hrs 30mins (including interval)
Kenneth Branagh has “never been shy” about following in the footsteps of Laurence Olivier, said Paul Taylor in The Independent. So it was almost inevitable that he would one day take on the role of Archie Rice, one of Olivier’s most celebrated stage triumphs. Rice is the clapped-out music hall artiste who “personifies the decline” of Suez-era Britain in Osborne’s 1957 play (“Don’t clap too hard, we’re all in a very old building”). Branagh “rises to the occasion with a performance that is never less than thoroughly arresting” – and in which he brilliantly conveys Archie’s louche “handon-hip suggestiveness”.
Is he as good as Olivier? No, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Olivier’s performance had a “mercurial vitality and dangerous mischief” that the “benign” Branagh can’t touch. Yet in his own way, Branagh also “triumphs” in the part. Utterly convincing as a “resolutely smiling trouper staring down the barrel of deadly audience indifference”, he puts one oddly in mind of Eddie Izzard with his “red-lipsticked lips and toady grins”. Whether shuffling dandily along in tuxedo, dicky bow and boater, cane-a-twirl, or camply dishing out Osborne’s “knowingly excruciating, innuendoladen repartee”, it is immediately clear why Archie is top of the bill, yet never truly made it.
Even so, the performance is much “too sober and chipper”, said Maxie Szalwinska in The Sunday Times. There are “hints of the mirthless, chilling ebullience Branagh might have achieved in the role, but – the softie – he keeps taking overt pity on his character”. It should be up to the audience to find sympathy for this “remorselessly hollow man”. It is also a serious mistake on the part of director Rob Ashford to stage the music hall scenes and the ones with Archie’s fractious family as continuous action on the same shabby music hall set, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. This not only diminishes the family scenes (Greta Scacchi and Gawn Grainger are outstanding as Archie’s wife and father), it muddies the whole idea of Archie – at once heroic in public and desperate in private – as the symbol of a collapsing culture.