The Angry John Osborne and his Entertainer with Mr Branagh

On Thursday October 27^th October, I made a third visit in three days to Cineworld Bolden for a relay of the Kenneth Branagh Theatre series in which he stars as Archie Rice, John Osborne’s Play the Entertainer, a role which Sir Lawrence Oliver made his own on stage and in a film production. The play has been part of my life for over 50 years first with the touring production at Croydon in 1958 with John Slater as Archie Rice. I also remember the 1960 film with Lawrence Oliver and which was subsequently shown on Television which I watched earlier on Amazon Prime.  There was a subsequent TV production but I only had brief visual memories of all previous experiences so the crude directness of the stage play performed by the Branagh company was something of a surprise, particularly racism, homophobia, anti-foreigner lecherous right-wing Archie and his nostalgic father, and where much of it was removed from the 1960 film version.

Archie Rice and his father are part of the traditional musical hall which ended in the fifties and the end of the pier Summer show which was revived in 1970’s and 1980 with performances by stars who made their names in television. My childhood seaside memories including being taken to the seaside shows, the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on Sea comes to mind and in my middle age I went to shows at Scarborough and Great Yarmouth. Although the 1960’s film was made at Sheperton a large part of the film is at a coastal resort and at one of the huge open air swmming pools with tiered seating for spectators to watch shows and the beauty competitions. The end of prolonged second world war austerity, the temporary popularity of traditional jazz, the growth of rock and roll, the growth of television, the end of the Empire, the boom in cheap continental holidays, especially to Spain, the more discerning to Greece, Italy and the South of France, the British summer weather were all issues in this play which the play which coincides with the time of the ill-fated Suez War.

Archie discloses to his daughter Jean (played by Joan Plowright in the film for whom Olivier left world famous second wife actress Vivien Leigh wife of twenty years) that his first wife walked out when she found him in bed with his present wife and during the play Archie begins an affair with a girl the same age as his daughter because her father has the money to back his latest show venture. The actress Shirley Ann Field plays a beauty Queen with stage ambitions who Archie chases as just another conquest until finding out that her father is a businessman with money (this man’s wife is played by Thora Hird although what the trio are doing staying at a holiday camp is odd).

The play begins with the arrival of Jean to visit her father and grandfather having run away from a planned weekend trip with her fiancée because of perceived irreconcilable difference. The fiancé only appears at the end of the play but in the film, he takes centre stage, ridiculing his fiancé’s work, critical of her family and her opposition to the Suez War, having joined the in large central London protest at the time against the action of Prime Minister Anthony Eden jointly with France but not supported by the USA after Egypt’s nationalist leader Colonel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, recognised China and made a bid to become the leader of the Arab States. The lack of USA support and opposition at home led to the withdrawal and a major blow to the standing in the world of the UK and national pride until the success of the Falkland’s venture although this came at a high price.

Archie has two sons played in the film by two of the UK’s finest film actors who also had careers on stage and on TV. I have seen nearly all the thirty fiveish films of Alan Bates who was born five years before me and died in 2003. He had first made his in mark on stage in John Osborn’s successful launching the era of the Angry Young Man play Look Back in Anger and Alan became a household name with his film performance Whistle down the Wind with the daughter of John Mills, Haley. In the Entertainer Alan plays a national service conscience objector sentenced to six-month imprisonment and who works as a hospital porter and in the film, he is a stage manager. I have seen Alan Bates in one London Stage play Still Life

The other son who is doing his national service is not seen in the play but is given a role in the film with a send-off at a station by his sister and fiancé. This is the first film role by Albert Finney in a part as a carefree fatalist what will be will be. The capture of this son becomes national news and his execution by Egyptians make him into a national hero, and brings welcome attention to the dysfunctional struggling family. Albert Finney made his international name in the film Saturday Night and Sunday morning in a career which continued with appearances in the Jason Bourne films of the past decade and the Bond movie Skyfall.

A feature of Billy and Archie Rice that they bring nationalism and Patriotism into the their acts through their songs representing a Britain finding it difficult to adjust to the world as it rapidly changed and finding that gunboat diplomacy is not only ineffective but has come back bite through the execution of son. It has taken another fifty years before the public through the parents and relatives of the men who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, those who pressed for the Iraq Inquiry and who questioned the proposed decisions to enter the war between Syrians in what will appear too many to be another forsaken failed state.

Both men are bigots who ought to know better and I can only assume that some of the offensive words used are in the original script and deleted from the film making Roger Liversy who plays Billy appear a warm, understanding and tolerant of his son and grandchildren, nostalgic clinging to the standards of his generation where the truth of life are not mentioned even especially within families. Archie is portrayed as honest in his willingness to save his career and pay the wages of the company by sacrificing his wife who he has used in his stand-up comedy. The word coloured in the 1960 film become black in the play but if this an acceptable modernization to the original text why is reference to wogs retained and used more than once? Are the several references to Poles in the original text or is this also an attempt to bring Archie up to date as a UKIP/national front supporter?

His wife, Greta Scacchi with Branagh, Benda De Banzi with Olivier, and who in the film retains her big explanation of why she has become alcohol dependent, is presented as all the wives who have put up with womanizing men, because of gifted kindness, and from her perspective being a good father, from guilt at having set her cap at him and from fear that being without him, she would be without anyone. Or maybe the underlying reason is more simple, that she did not enjoy sex, she was content for him to get that satisfaction elsewhere if someone else did not do to her what she had done to his first wife. The modern women in 1956 is played by Joan Plowright t and a less worldly accepting in 2016 by Sophie Mcshera-  Daisy of Downton Abbey.  In the film, she invites the fiancé into her bed whatever the landlady’s rules reminding that in childhood we stayed at one family holiday where after breakfast we were not allowed back until time for the evening meal.  Plowright does not batter an eyelid at some of the sayings of the men, you do not look at the mantelpiece when you stoke the fire which are the time had the same impact as the bun in the oven comment in The Cruel Sea.  Mcshera is not happy with a lot of the men talk and in the latest production she rejects the fiancé when he comes calling at the end of film with the position at best ambiguous in the film. I cannot remember if it was the surviving son who makes the comment about a servile public content with the wave of a gloved hand from the golden coach.

In both productions, it is Jean who tells her father the proposed marriage is not acceptable when father seeks to gain her blessing and in both instances, she tells grandfather and he contacts the parents to explain that the suitor is already married with a grown-up family.

Archie and the family are still offered a way out as his wife’s brother has emigrated to Canada and made such a success of a running a hotel that has opened another which he wants Archie to run. In the play the offer includes the air fares while in the film it is Archie’s brother who offers to pay the fares and meet the outstanding debts    having been told of the offer.  The  present play production takes a swipe at Gateshead and Hartlepool of the  950’s, probably justified  given the position of towns in the early 1970’s was town where I first  arrived in the North East  as likely venues for  the end of pier Salad days  type of musical or even the Good Companions of J B Priestley although the stand-up  comedy of Bobby Thompson the Little Waster remains legendry and who made a point of trying to make me belly laugh one evening doing a turn for a Councillor friend at a home for the Elderly, and where in  fact northern comics did turns at the male  dominated social and working men’s club at weekends  when wives and girlfriends were encouraged to also attend.  It was the pubs in the North East who took up the strippers and pole dancing as clubs would have found acceptable the posed nudity with which Archie commenced to dabble to try and get the punters to keep coming through the doors

Archie goes to London to try and get the funds to keep the show going, a new show with a headliners and new costumes but the impresario in question wants to see the goods before putting in the cash for a tour. This reminds reading that it cost a quarter of million to move the original production of Miss Saigon from theatre to theatre. When the deal involving a new wife as a headliner collapses, the grandfather suggests his name is still able to draw in folk and offers to go back on the boards but Jean’s premonition that this will kill him is proved right.  It is as this point that Archie admits he has signed a cheque for the new production on the strength of the withdrawn investment which means he will go to prison, and miss the opportunity to celebrity 21 years of not paying any income tax.

The play ends with Archie making what he knows is his last performance and having rejected the opportunity to go to Canada with his wife and son he accepts going to prison to see if it will bring him to life being dead behind his eyes. In the most revealing admission of the play and using far more crude language than permitted in the film script Archie tells Jean that it was the singing of a blues/gospel black woman at a club when after war he visited Canada that she brought home to him real ability to communicate the emotions of a life through a voice in a song. He tries to do the same on learning of the death of his son but he and we know while a good attempt there something missing in his makeup. At one level, he hopes going to prison will change him although he jokes about it. Those of us who have had the experience know that it can have the opposite outcome destroying without recreating or hardening into the life long criminal.

Those who are critical of the work, pointing out that it is not a great play with music song and dance fail to appreciate that it marks not only the end of an era between Britain’s past and future but was part of a whole genre of theatrical works reflecting life as it was and not life as the middle class wanted it to be portrayed. The Hollywood of the twin-bedded rooms for married couples or the sophisticated interactions of Noel Coward’s Private Lives and Terence Rattigan’s Deep Blue Sea. I have been struck recently how white the audience at Bolden always is. This brings me to the second of the three visits in three days to see the Queen of Kitwe in Uganda.