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LITERATURE OF THE PLAY THE ENTERTAINER
The Entertainer is a three-act play by John Osborne, first produced in 1957. His first play, Look Back in Anger, had attracted mixed notices but a great deal of publicity. Having depicted an "angry young man" in the earlier play, Osborne wrote at Laurence Olivier's request about an angry middle-aged man in The Entertainer. Its main character is Archie Rice, a failing music-hall performer. Years later, Tony Richardson, who directed The Entertainer's premiere season, described Archie as "the embodiment of a national mood ... Archie was the future, the decline, the sourness, the ashes of old glory, where Britain was heading." The first performance was given on 10 April 1957 at the Royal Court Theatre, London. That theatre was known for its commitment to new and non-traditional drama, and the inclusion of a West End star such as Olivier in the cast caused much interest.
The Entertainer, play in 13 parts by John Osborne, produced in 1957 and published in 1959. The playwright used a seedy third-rate English music-hall comedian and the deteriorating Empire Music Hall as metaphors for Great Britain’s decline as a world power. In brief bursts of topical, frequently disjointed Brechtian commentary, The Entertainer also decries the rise of pop culture and the chic espousal of radical political views.²
The Entertainer
Osborne’s society is one that seems immune to creativity and inimical to full humanity. In The Entertainer, Archie Rice looks back on the past nobility of the music hall (his is now a tawdry striptease joint) and forward to the barren legacy he has to offer his alienated children, and he wonders where all the “real people” have gone. Like Colonel Redfern, he is an anachronism, a personification of degraded values, as exemplified by his adherence to a dead art. He lacks even the satisfaction of the dying Billy Rice, who can at least withdraw into memories of free pudding with a pint of beer and respectable women in elegant dresses. Instead, Archie must console himself as best he can with a pitiful affair, his “little round world of light” onstage, and the conviction that at least he has “had a go at life.”
The music hall structure of “turns” on a bill is imitated in the structure of the play itself. In this way, the story of the Rice family becomes an elaborate sketch, including overture, comic patter, heartrending interludes, and skits of love and death. Like the music hall, which has been corrupted by nudity and obscenity, the family unit, once a bastion of British dignity, has fallen on hard times. Phoebe, Archie’s wife, indulges her husband’s adulteries and failures and seeks shelter in local movie houses (another degraded art form). His son Frank is a conscientious objector who can only manage a “relationship substitute” with his father. His daughter Jean is also estranged from her parents, as she nurses the pain of a failed engagement and teaches an art class to children she loathes. In short, the younger generation is embittered by an inheritance of disappointment and ruined values, and Archie is incapable of communicating with them naturally and openly. He chooses, rather, to relate to them through a contrived performance, as he would to one of his vulgar audiences. In the place of intimacy, there is cajolement and manipulation, so that it becomes impossible for characters to distinguish sincerity from routine, confession from monologue.
“Everybody’s all right,” croons Archie, and the central tension of The Entertainer is that between his efforts to sustain happiness, Britishness, the welfare state, and the state of his private little world, all by sheer theatricality, and the steady deconstruction of those myths. The final blows are the deaths of Billy Rice and young Mick, the one seeming to pass away out of his own irrelevance to the contemporary world, and the other killed in an otherworldly war. The result is shell shock. All that Archie can turn to is a quiet drink and a few awkward old songs in the faded spotlight. Like Look Back in Anger, which concludes with a desperate desire for mindless retreat, The Entertainer shows the responses to crisis as the familiar patter and the old soft shoe.