The Entertainer - Garrick

This production is slick in the theatre and amateurish offstage: it’s the perfect The Entertainer, in an ugly photo-negative.

If Osborne’s play has any depth – and I’m not wholly convinced it is that deep – it’s in depicting how difficult it is to accept the end of an era. It’s a paradoxically timeless theme. For Archie Rice, that should be performing capable if hackneyed routines in dilapidated old halls; for Billie Rice, that should be having attitudes he abhors brought in his own home by his own flesh and blood. With a director who can physically articulate the tackiness of the former whilst domesticating the diatribes of the latter, it would be a surprisingly deep consideration of life under Eden, which would be all too pertinent today – after all, not only is the subject of generational differences about politics and protest and particularly immigration one of incredible topicality, but so is talentless performers clinging onto their desperate dreams of glory and need to perform (Sarah Harding). It doesn’t need updating to make modern: it needs clarity.

Rob Ashford is a choreographer. He treats this play like his choreographer namesake Marshall treated Chicago and (shudder) Nine; when inner angst grows too great, we cut to the stage so the emotion can be literalised through dance. It’s the Fosse line of thinking taken to its extreme. It would be a good idea had Kander & Ebb written The Entertainer, but John Osborne did, and the play isn’t written like those musicals are. The dance sequences only work at articulating the drama if the relationship between theatre and reality is airtight, and the drama has depth, and depth comes from reality. Actually, Peggs, I kind of think that this should be more Ivanov than Much Ado, given that although Branagh’s playing a comedian he’s not playing a good one, so that lack of comedy should seem tragic. But Ashford seems to miss that, and stages it like a competent musical with an incompetent book, like Much Ado with xenophobic asides. The home scenes make for dull drama: keeping them ‘onstage’ gives them an artifice which only makes sense because of Archie, and then to have characters literally come upstage to deliver points to us seems artificial, clunky, almost amateurish, not gelling with the script. On the other hand, to back up Branagh with the sexiest, sleekest dancers in fabulous costumes suggests he’s good, they’re good and this is a good dance, and that’s just not what this play is about. Rather than naff up the dancing but respect the domestic, Ashford respects the dancing and naffs up the domestic.

Actually, making the dance sequences hokey would actually do wonders at representing Billy Rice’s line of thought, and make this Fosse-style make sense, but it doesn’t. For this to work you want a director who can cut between song and spoken, ‘reality’ and ‘the theatrical’, all the while appreciating the relationship between the two, the phoniness of the former and the intrinsic truth of the latter, all the while able to stage it with vim and pace. You want a Susan Stroman, who understands how to toe the line between pageantry and unpleasantness simultaneously, using the former to literalise the latter and render its ugliness palpable. You want an actual Bob Fosse, who subverts, not enhances, reality through song, directs character first and choreography second, and in All That Jazz had an Archie-ish figure similarly trying to escape reality, not enhance it, through his art – think of the final scene of that movie, the superficial sleekness but evident emptiness of Bye Bye Life. You want a Carrie Cracknell, who can articulate fraught family relationships like no other, whilst incorporating a certain musicality a la Blurred Lines or Macbeth.

Or, dare I say, you want Sir Chuckles Branagh. A marriage of the phony sleekness of Michael Caine’s house in Sleuth and the musical numbers of his Love’s Labour’s Lost would make this work. Branagh actually aped Fosse’s flashiness in one sequences in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but I think Branagh understands Fosse’s subtleness: the character of Lenny or the self deprecating laceration of All That Jazz (indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if a bit of Roy Scheider informed Branagh’s performance). Most tellingly, his performances hits all the bum notes this bad performer should, with a sadness behind his eyes showing Branagh understands the script; Joel Grey always says that his Emcee is an amalgamation of the worst, most desperate performers he ever saw; Branagh’s Archie Rice so richly steals from this line of thought too. For his Garrick swansong, it’s a bold decision to make Archie so very untalented let alone ugly, but Branagh clearly understands the power that comes from bad performing. The constant awkwardness, line-flubbing and bad-name-dropping from his desperate untalented hulk is unpleasant to watch in all the right ways. He’s a man only ever able to engage with others when on stage, thus bringing faux-staginess to his real life, semi-aware that his stage skills are less than stellar; Branagh’s Archie is clearly keeping self-realisation at arm’s length, and that’s very sad to watch. Less full-bodied than in The Winter’s Tale and less damn fun than Harlequinade*, maybe, but still a stellar piece of acting (I missed The Painkiller and wonder now if, in retrospect, that might have been the highlight of this season). And for any fans of Branagh’s musical Love’s Labour’s Lost (I think there are six of us), it’s a real treat to see the man dance in person.

Other performances variable – Gawn Grainger was good but no John Hurt and I think I’d be saying John Hurt was good but no Ron Cook; Greta Saachi does the best of a bad job; daughter fairly mediocre but that’s mostly being swamped by this building and direction.

So, in a nutshell, a great actor wastes some of his best work in probably the worst directorial effort of his Garrick tenure. The real issue is that, without a proper drama around him, the star turn here is wholly diminished, with Archie a dancer first and foremost rather than a bad father first and foremost. Branagh still shines through, but it’s a battle. A dated play and a too-superficial interpretation, but to watch Branagh bring the sad self-hatred of his Ivanov back, then bury it under the bad Gene Kelly he danced in Love’s Labour’s Lost, makes for powerful, dislikeable, substantial viewing.

Just stay home, turn on the TV, watch a double bill of Wallander and Love’s Labour’s Lost instead.

*Weirdly, now the dust has settled, Harlequinade comes across as a richer study of life on the stage than The Entertainer does – and Harlequinade is so flimsy that they didn’t bother reviving it alongside The Browning Version at Chichester. There’s a perverse posthumous irony or victory in the fact that even lesser Rattigan is proving so deep and so successful, whereas Osborne very, very much looks like a period piece.

P.S. As much as anything, this theatre was just too big for this play – the Garrick’s quite glamorous, this shouldn’t be. I want a chamber version of this in Wilton’s Music Hall now it’s back in business, or possibly somewhere genuinely grotty like the Arcola – Greg Hicks was there not long ago and I bet he’d eat this part up with aplomb, particularly if he could get so up-close to his audience that it would be scary.

P.P.S. It’s also a shame that this comes so shortly after such a strong revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, another show about a lesser theatrical talent peddling his wares whilst his family circles around him with their own problems. Really, the main difference is that Osborne writes quite unpleasant characters with unwieldy and didactic monologues, where O’Neill is a poet so the genius of that play is, quite simply, how well it is written. It’s a tenuous comparison, but there were a fair few moments watching Branagh criticise his own career where all I could hear was Irons barking the same self-criticisms but with so much more substance in his speeches, or watching Branagh’s patriarch be taken down a few pegs by his children where all I could think was that these monologues were blunt and obvious compared to the desperation of the Tyrone children. It’s a superficial comparison, but one which damages this production quite a bit, if you saw Irons and Manville work their magic. Simply put, The Entertainer is a fairly good (not great) leading man’s role, but honestly it’s not that good a play, is it?