A few months ago I opined that, contrary
to many people’s opinion apparently including his own, Sir Kenneth
Branagh isn’t actually that much cop at Shakespeare on stage. But
that’s not to write him off as an actor or director. Even when he’s
really labouring to place himself within a heritage, he can often pull
it off, as he does here. The notorious Laurence Olivier comparisons
began in 1989 with his film of
Henry
V; in the same year, he enjoyed success onstage in his own
company’s revival of John Osborne’s
Look
Back In Anger. Now he brings the Oliver and Osborne strands
together in
The Entertainer
as third-rate music-hall man Archie Rice, the role in which Olivier
reinvented himself for a new generation in the late Fifties.
With other actors, you can usually see them switch on the hackneyed
razzmatazz when Archie goes onstage, forming a contrast to his
hollowness and going through the motions in the family scenes which
alternate these routines. Branagh’s Archie, however, has either long
since burnt out that circuit or never found the switch in the first
place. You can’t help but see that his belief in himself, and in
music-hall itself (just as it was sounding its death rattle in
Britain), is entirely unfounded in either talent or personality.
Whatever it is, Archie doesn’t have it. When he confesses to his
daughter “I’m dead behind these eyes,” we already know because we can
see that he’s dead in front of them as well.
Archie’s doddering yet impassioned father Billy, whose tap shoes his
son believes (rightly) he can never fill, is excellently played by Gawn
Grainger; Greta Scacchi as Archie’s second wife Phoebe is a world away
from the glamorous roles that made her reputation, and is quite
brilliant. Branagh’s now-regular director Rob Ashford overdoes it now
and again, bookending the production with a symbolic prologue and coda
which are both unnecessary and the sort of thing that the famously
vitriolic Osborne would have fumed about.
In the most important regard, however, Ashford hits the nail squarely
on the head. Osborne wrote the play in 1957, shortly after the Suez
crisis, which looms as a grim backdrop to the events onstage. He used
Archie and music-hall as emblems of Britain’s decline in international
power and self-respect. It may seem odd to say that this production is
successful because that dimension doesn’t pierce us keenly. I think,
though, that whether intentionally or not, this is the point: as a
nation we, too, are now collectively dead behind these eyes.
Written for The Lady.