The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Feb. 24, 1958

The Entertainer (by John Osborne) must be regarded primarily as Sir Laurence Olivier's evening. But. whatever its weaknesses, the play is still by England's most interesting new playwright in years. This time the author of Look Back in Anger has no brilliantly disgruntled intellectual for a hero, but a flabbily disintegrating vaudevillian. On the music hall stage Archie Rice is a cheap-Jack with rancid jokes and forced jauntiness, whose very vulgarity lacks drive. In theatrical digs he is a shoddy, cynical family man, exploiting those who love him and embossing betrayal with abuse. Even with his back to the wall, he can somehow see the writing on it.

Olivier has caught Archie's makeup in all its rich, mangy detail, whether the scared swagger or the seedy lewdness, and has portrayed an out-at-elbows flop yammering that the world is out of joint. Of the vivid details Olivier makes a firm design; from a richly unsavory character part he forges a vital character. Indeed. as staged by Tony Richardson, the whole production scores—in Joan Plowright's protesting daughter, George Relph's old-school-actor father, and notably in Brenda de Banzie's distraught, put-upon wife.

Though needing so expert a production, The Entertainer can be too easily written off as a play. With its alternating home life and vaudeville turns, it can misleadingly seem at times less play than stunt. The writing lacks the brilliant crackle of Osborne's earlier play. Where the hero of Look Back has a superb talent for abuse, Archie Rice turns meanly abusive from having no talent for anything. And where Look Back boasts a stingingly real attitude but has increasingly factitious situations, The Entertainer boasts a genuine situation but everywhere strains for an attitude. Its attempt to enlarge its characters into social symbols, to enfold its cheap-Jack in the Union Jack and pass off a grubby slice of life as contemporary England, never succeeds.

The truth is that, unlike Look Back, The Entertainer deals not with society but with humanity. It is thus less topical and theatrically fresh. It is no snarling trumpet call to inaction, but the whiny yet at times affecting fiddling of a somewhat hackneyed yet not bogus tune. It is oddly unified, its twanged and tawdry stage scenes harmonizing perfectly with its family ones. Compared to Look Back, where people swim flashingly about in a heavy surf of resentment. The Entertainer's is a static little world in which people without very much showmanship drown.

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"I don't sing or dance very well, you understand.'' says Sir Laurence Olivier of his performance in The Entertainer. "But fortunately, I play a very bad entertainer."