Sir Ken’s Archie fails to chime with our times
Entertaining? No,
SIR Ken Branagh, so palpably healthy, wearing a natty haircut and spitting out his lines with artistry, has cast himself as ageing desperado Archie Rice.
It is unconvincing, and not just because, in Archie’s eyeliner and stage lipstick, Sir Ken looks worryingly like Eddie Izzard.
John Osborne’s 1957 play The Entertainer is in part about decline in postSuez Britain, end-of-Empire blues and economic malaise. But it can and should be about more than that.
Fading music hall comedian Archie is a doomed species surrounded by a drunken wife, a deluded father and some trapped offspring. The sense of failure can become overwhelming.
That level of suffocation is never achieved in the Branagh Company production which opened in the West End last night.
Maybe Sir Ken was miscast and maybe a couple of the other actors are wrong but I suspect it goes deeper than that.
This play does not chime with the national mood. After a lovely August day, in a summer when we have escaped the clammy grip of a foreign empire (the EU) and our economy is going gangbusters, who wants this sort of moaning?
‘I’m dead behind the eyes,’ says adulterous Archie. Sir Ken’s eyes, however, dart here and there. He brims with energy. Always does. Greta Scacchi is rather good as Archie’s gin-swilling wife, the underloved Phoebe. She summons a convincing whiff of the 1950s with her lumpy dress and a blondeish wig.
The part of Billy Rice, Archie’s father, was originally given to John Hurt but he withdrew owing to illness. It is now trotted out by Gawn Grainger.
Christopher Oram’s handsome set turns the Rices’ lodgings into a decrepit proscenium arch. Archie’s music-hall turns are accompanied by four bodacious dancers and a super blast of trumpet. At one point we have Suez-era news reel footage which certainly reminds one of how long ago it all was.
The Entertainer tends to be hailed as a ‘state of the nation play’. The trouble with state of the nation plays is that the state of the nation can change, sometimes for the better. Then the play feels glum and negative and a bit so-what-ish.