When Kenneth Branagh started his Renaissance Theatre Company in the 1980s, one of his early successes was in John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger; in the same year, his film version of Henry V drew numerous comparisons with Laurence Olivier (which many said he actively sought). Now he draws the Osborne and Olivier strands together in the final production of the West End season by the company which bears his own name. The central role of no-hope music-hall man Archie Rice was the cornerstone of Olivier’s reinvention of himself for a new generation; Branagh does not pull off the same radical re-evaluation, but he and his now-regular stage director Rob Ashford do the play full justice and more.

On its last West End revival in 2007, Sarah Hemming observed that Robert Lindsay’s Archie was always performing. Branagh’s hardly ever is, and that is not a criticism. This Archie is always trying – he fully lives up to his self-defeating catchphrase “I have a go, lady” – but whether under the faded gilt proscenium of Christopher Oram’s stage, patches of its frescoed ceiling falling off, or in the family’s theatrical digs which are superimposed on the same space, Branagh’s Archie never for a moment convinces others, nor really himself. When he confesses to his daughter (Sophie McShera) “I’m dead behind these eyes,” it comes as no shock because, contrary to the hopes which he knows to be fond illusions, he’s dead in front of them as well.

Gawn Grainger is excellent as Archie’s doddering yet fiery father Billy, whose tap shoes his son believes he can never fill; as Archie’s second wife Phoebe, Greta Scacchi is dowdily unrecognisable and brilliant. Ashford includes a symbolic prologue and coda which are unnecessary and fly in the face of both Osborne’s writing and the rest of his own production.

The play premièred in 1957, shortly after the Suez Crisis which informs events onstage and serves as a watershed for the decline in international power and self-respect of Britain that is its real theme. If it fails to prick us with the same keenness some 60 years on, I suspect that is because as a nation we, too, are now collectively dead behind these eyes.

Written for the Financial Times.