Theatre Paul Bailey
THE ENTERTAINER KENNY MORGAN
Kenneth Branagh has brought his yearlong season of plays at the Garrick Theatre to an end with Rob Ashford’s production of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, in which he stars as Archie Rice, the faded music hall song-and-dance man first played by Laurence Olivier in 1957. The model for Archie was the incomparable Max Miller, the unashamedly lecherous comic who was known as the Cheeky Chappie. (Max was banned from BBC radio for several years for telling a joke that somehow got past the censors. ‘I was crossing this narrow bridge and I saw this blonde coming towards me. She was well-out in front, with a lovely rolled desk. I stopped and she stopped. What could I do? I didn’t know whether to block her passage or toss myself off.’ Ah, those happy, innocent days.)
Olivier shared Osborne’s admiration for Max, who – like many other great comedians – had a streak of effeminacy in him. Whenever Olivier said ‘Thank God I’m normal’, he put on a camp expression or waved a limp wrist. Branagh does the same in a performance that could be described as an act of homage to his hero. It is very accomplished, as is everything that Branagh does.
The play remains lopsided and problematical. Archie is intended to personify a nation in a state of decay (it was written at the time of Suez), while his father Billy, railing against the invasion of his beloved Edwardian England by Poles and Irish, represents an Eden that, in truth, only existed for a privileged few. In the text there is a distinction between the scenes of family life and Archie’s ever desperate stage appearances, but here they are blended together. Christopher Oram’s set is a provincial music hall that has seen better days. It encompasses the Rices’ home as well as the touring theatre in which Archie is ‘dying’ night after night. This contrivance weakens what little effect
The Entertainer still possesses. The chorus girls who surround Archie look as if they work out at the gym and eat and drink the right healthy things. But we are meant to be in a tatty seaside town in the 1950s, when the girls smoked and drank and supplemented their meagre earnings by making themselves available to the highest bidder. The saucy young ladies at the Garrick wouldn’t be bothering with a has-been like Archie and they certainly wouldn’t be offering him a free quickie in his dressing-room.
It is left to Gawn Grainger, an always reliable actor, to give the evening an air of authenticity. He invests the discontented Billy with a grumbling authority, by turns irritating and funny. Greta Scacchi, as Archie’s wife Phoebe, emotes too much too often, and Sophie Mcshera plays their daughter Jean, a natural-born Corbynista, on a single strident note. All the while Branagh sings and dances with his customary authority. If Archie is meant to be in possession of the remains of a heart and soul, Branagh doesn’t find them, as Max Wall did some years ago in a revival at the Greenwich Theatre.
There’s another period piece of sorts at the exciting and enterprising Arcola theatre complex in the London borough of Hackney. Kenny Morgan by Mike Poulton tells the sad story of a young actor in the 1940s who began his short-lived career as one of bright young things in the film of Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears. He was nineteen when he became Rattigan’s lover. The playwright introduced him to a world of caviar, champagne, tailored suits and all the luxuries the kept boy of a rich and famous man might expect. These weren’t enough for Kenny, who wanted something more difficult to find – love, in a word. In Poulton’s play, he is living in a Camden boarding house with a fellow actor named Alec Lennox, for whom he has left Rattigan. Kenny loves Alec passionately, but Alec, a bisexual with a drink problem, can’t return his affections. While Alec is away in Birmingham, Kenny attempts to gas himself.
Kenny Morgan closely resembles Rattigan’s masterpiece The Deep Blue Sea. There is the kindly lodger who finds Kenny in front of the gas fire, the struck-off Jewish doctor who brings him back to life, there is the landlady and, instead of the High Court judge, there is Terence Rattigan. Poulton is suggesting, very subtly and cleverly, that this is the play Rattigan might have written in those pre-wolfenden days. In real life, Kenny killed himself at the first attempt, and Alec, whose surname wasn’t Lennox, was a hard-drinking heterosexual. No matter. Lucy Bailey’s production is beautifully paced, and Paul Keating is very moving as Kenny, Marlene Sidaway excellent as the sharp-tongued Mrs Simpson and George Irving and Matthew Bulgo could not be bettered as the doctor and the lodger. Simon Dutton has the hardest task in the role of Rattigan, but he succeeds in capturing the arrogance, the reticence and shyness of a highly successful and deeply unhappy man.