Review: The Entertainer (Garrick Theatre)

There couldn’t be a better moment for a revival of John Osborne‘s The Entertainer – that great, smouldering cry of anguish at Britain’s changing face and its loss of identity in a post-imperial world.

Written in 1957, in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, its first lines are a diatribe against the immigrants who are altering the complexion of a tatty, Northern seaside town. In the fallout of Brexit, such casual xenophobia has an uncanny echoing ring.

So when he chose the play as the final hurrah of his company’s 13-month season at the Garrick, Kenneth Branagh displayed considerable prescience. But it’s also likely that he was attracted by the role of Archie Rice, the failing, flailing vaudevillian of the title.

Those of us with long memories recall that Branagh himself has a hidden song and dance man lurking inside him, as he proved at the very start of his career in a play about James Cagney, one of his idols. And Archie, of course, was originally played by Laurence Olivier – an actor in whose footsteps Branagh has closely trodden. It seems like a match made in heaven. Yet somehow, in Rob Ashford’s heavy-handed production, the play and the performance fail to ignite.

The opening scene bodes magnificently. We see Branagh in silhouette, in the spotlight, back to the audience, bent forward, tapping as if in a trance. Scantily-clad girls emerge like ghosts from the shadows as on he goes, never ceasing, lonely as a long-distance runner, ploughing his own hopeless, defiant furrow against the death of the music hall and the destruction of illusion. That single fleeting image sums up the play.

When the action switches to the cramped apartment of the Rice family, the proscenium arch setting stays in Christopher Oram’s set, framing the action in faded, gilded grandeur, with a surround of backstage clutter. This has the benefits of speed – the narrative can move seamlessly from the family’s decaying digs to Archie’s onstage patter to an empty theatre – but fatally muddles the point of Osborne’s dual narrative.

The problem is compounded by Branagh’s performance. As the on-stage Archie, all camp innuendo and desperate, dying gags, he captures the bravado of the man, but he can’t seem to find the measure of his emotional bankruptcy in his private life. He actually looks too modern in a shirt and suit that seem out of period. You never get beyond the actor’s charisma to see the void within the man he is playing.

Yet if Archie doesn’t make you cry with his simultaneous delusion and defiance, then the play can’t take wing; its appeal rests on its difficult, intangible combination of nostalgia for a time that is already past and its knowledge that the voices of dissent are the sounds of the future. It’s not an easy play to like or to perform, yet if its different notes are carefully modulated it can be devastating.

Here, everything is flattened. Archie’s chorus girls are too beautiful and well dressed; the gradations of class that Greta Scacchi’s sad Phoebe so accurately describes are lost in accents and costumes that are too generic. The performances feel equally blurred. Jonah Hauer-King is impressive as Frank, but Gawn Grainger as Archie’s dad Billy, and Sophie McShera as his idealistic daughter Jean seem to have built their performances from the outside inwards, rather than starting at the heart.

The inner fire of this lament for a lost England has been extinguished.

The Entertainer runs at the Garrick Theatre until 12 November.