John Osborne’s historic follow-up to ‘Look Back In Anger’ charts the life of Archie Rice, son of smash-hit music hall comedian Billy Rice. Archie follows into his father’s profession, but is third-rate, an alcoholic, and performs his shows in an atmospherically hollow seaside resort. The play is historic in a dual sense; we glimpse not just the decline of the music-hall tradition, but of imperialist Britain.
Rebecca Threllfall’s production succeeds at some levels. The dramatic tension between the naturalism of the family scenes and the open theatricality of Archie’s ‘live’ performances works a treat, as does the live brass band during those performances. Cudmore is at times terrific in the title role, and as he reeled off his ailing array of jokes, I became aware of something important; we become more nostalgic for the age of the music hall through the witness of its death, than we do or would have done had Osborne depicted its success. This is Threllfall and Cudmore’s key achievement. The rest of the cast is mostly strong; there are occasiona vivid moments from Phoebe Thompson as his wife, Phoebe, and from Theo Merz as their nonchalant son, Frank.
And yet several choices jarred. There was a strong propensity to drive over and through moments of action which do not bear directly upon plot or a character’s emotional core, when in fact these banalities of family life are there to be revelled in, à la BBC sitcom, ‘The Royal Family’. Instead, Threllfall’s cast confuse pace with speed. The banalities should be enjoyed, they need more time, and more trust in the moment and Osborne’s language. That’s when we are really drawn in; in a sense both Cudmore’s Archie and Thompson’s Phoebe search for the audience in important moments when we should be searching for them.
The ‘big’ moments of the play should be thrown away. As it is, these moments are too obviously grandiose. We are aware of them as moments and not as truths. Elsewhere, it is Osborne’s mundane, earthy, coarse language that separates his kitchen-sink realism from the well-spoken, middle-class world of Rattigan. Often characters play lines and not words. Granted, the family scenes must be naturalistic, and there is a very strict fourth wall in place, but at the moment it seems the characters are restricted by their very quest for this naturalism. The specificity of the language is in turn sacrificed, in particular by Cudmore and Thompson. Whilst the snippets of seedy sea-side music hall comedy succeeds, the inanity of the family scenes do not, and when Mike Rice is reported dead, the profundity of feeling that should be reached is not. Hardly a banality, even this moment is sped over, and the truth of it is lost.
Once the play starts its run proper, I feel it important to say that these criticisms could have been ironed out and this may well turn into an excellent play. Go and see it.
The Entertainer
