Andizhan state university named after zakhiriddin mukhammad babur

The Entertainer is a stage play by John James Osborne. An actor and playwright, he attracted relatively little wealth or fame for his stage skills but became famous almost overnight for his 1956 play Look Back in Anger, which accurately captured the sentiments of post-war Britons. The play is credited for transforming British theater by introducing edgy, realistic material. This gritty "realist" approach, with its intense emotional appeal, helped create new interest in live performance, which was gradually dying out with the fading popularity of the music-halls and the increasing emphasis on radio and television. British theater needed a boost: people had already seen everything Shakespeare and the other classical writers had produced that was worth seeing, and bedroom farces, while amusing, really weren't holding the public interest. Look Back in Anger tapped into the barely suppressed British hostilities surrounding the economy, class, changing social roles, and other trends that had left a generation of people feeling increasingly disenfranchised. The play therefore made John Osborne a wealthy and influential playwright, and created a lot of interest in The Entertainer, first performed in 1957.
The Entertainer focuses on the Rice family, particularly the middle-aged Archie Rice who is experiencing the gradual decline of music-hall entertainment along with his fading personal fortunes. Unable to adapt to the new rock-and-roll way of doing things, Rice is a tragic character who adopts increasingly dishonest tactics in order for his productions to survive. The decline of the music-hall and the rise of other forms of entertainment are an allegory for the waning British global influence as experienced in the Suez Canal crisis.Sir Laurence Olivier, one of the most famous stage and film actors, initially wanted to play the aging Billy Rice but changed his mind and decided to play Archie instead: instead of the angry young man of Look Back in Anger, this play features an angry middle-aged man. Olivier also appears in the 1960 film version.
The play is in three acts comprising a total of thirteen scenes. Most take place in the Rice family home or on stage at Archie Rice's struggling music-hall, however there is one scene containing a funeral procession. Stage directions are very basic and focus chiefly on the setting and the character descriptions. Of the seven speaking parts, all but one character is a member of the Rice family. Archie Rice has an elderly father named Billy, and wife named Phoebe, and three children: Jean, Frank, and Mick (who does not appear onstage). Frank and Mick are Phoebe's children but Jean is not. Archie's brother Bill appears near the end of the play, as does Jean's former fiance Graham. Stage directions call for other performers, chiefly female, but they are not in speaking roles.I don't know if John Osborne's play "The Entertainer" is claimed by existentialists, adherents of the theater of the absurd, or boldly outspoken nihilists, but each of these overlapping groups has a legitimate reason to judge that the play is theirs. From each of the three perspectives, life is very different from what most of us take it to be.
Using Osborne's folk theater setting as our conceptual source, each of us is an entertainer. Contrary to conventional constructions, however, for each of us our audience is mainly our self. As such, we spend most of our social resources talking to our self, even when others are immediately present and seemingly engaged in dialogue. We talk past each other, hear mainly what we say, and distort the utterances of others to make them intelligible and acceptable given our view of things. We seek the company of others so that we can plausibly engage in the self-contained conversation that defines us and gives us purpose. Still we don't really respond to others as they are nor they to us, but since we're together chatting away we can imagine that we are genuinely interlocutors, even though each of us substitutes his or her substance for much of what is actually said.
Our world, moreover, is limited to whatever can be created by the commonplace and narrowly constrained ideas that we can assemble using the platitudes, cliche's, nostrums, and bromides that constitute our language. The pathetic lack of originality and inability to imagine anything new consigns us to repetition, not unlike the repeated performances of the same old vaudeville routine day after day, night after night. In this self-absorbed sense, everyone is first and foremost an entertainer, and as entertainers they are distributed among a variety of conventional ancillary roles: son, daughter, mother, father, slut, tax payer, cheat, soldier, has-been, never-was, rake, barrister, and so on. Each entertainer is plugged into and plays a variety of ancillary roles, but the variety is limited much as the language is limited. In the end, each life is trite and devoid of significance. Death is anticlimactic, first manifest in the indifference of others and their out of kilter, off target responses. Once we've lived long enough to learn the dull and insipid conventions that entertainers in their various guises live by, there's not much left but repetition.
Some unhappy few see through it all and catch a glimpse of the stilted emptiness of the social universe and their place in it. This insight may be worse than nothing: they know they're entertainers, as we are using that term, isolated, inarticulate, and socially determined, but there's nothing they can do about it. So they continue as entertainers, playing their socially prescribed roles.
This is, of course, a nihilistic universe, constituted of conventions but lacking moral certainty. Its absurdity inheres in our unself-conscious, scripted role playing, and the fact that most of us take it so seriously. It's existential character is inscribed in experiencing as consequential and fraught with meaning that which is preordained and finally comes to nothing. Osborne's The Entertainer gives us a world that is deeply cruel: despite the foregoing disclaimers, we can't avoid feeling. We suffer, strive, exert, mourn, and we hope for the best, but its just a play and we are just entertainers with pathetically limited resources to create a social place, each for himself or herself.
Archie Rice, the protagonist of The Entertainer, is one of the dubiously favored few who has seen through all this. He tells himself that this makes him immune to caring, disappointment, the humiliation of conventional assessments of failure, and the harsh judgments of those who think him an amoral opportunist. In the end, however, he is just as vulnerable as the rest of us, still a captive of the feckless role of entertainer, and feeling an unmet need for real contact with uncensored others.
The Entertainer is not a happy play, but it is well crafted, insightful, and instructive. My accounts of its nihilism, absurdity, and naked existentialism may be overdrawn, but the play makes them quite real, nonetheless. Beyond that, even without having seen the play, Osborne, with remarkable skill, gives us enough descriptive detail so that we can imagine how the characters would appear on stage. He accomplishes a great deal with comparatively few words. Given the opportunity, I'd love to see a performance of The Entertainer.