Brackish as old Brylcream

Kenneth Branagh’s obsession with Larry Olivier’s career is becoming such a bizarre act of theatrical necromancy that it deserves to be turned into a drama. Sir Ken and Lord Olivier could be played by the same actor. The Entertainer, written for Larry in 1956 by John Osborne, presents us with a washed-up music-hall star, Archie Rice, who is supposed to symbolise Britain’s post-colonial decline.

This version, directed by Rob Ashford, opens with a tap-dancing routine so ponderously executed that it leaves one wondering if Branagh is a lousy hoofer trying too hard, or a master of the art impersonating a lesser practitioner. This difficulty permeates the piece. By making the central character a useless comic, Osborne has sabotaged the play as an act of entertainment. If the lead performer can deliver a bad gag ineptly and garner a few reluctant titters from a bored audience he has, amazingly, fulfilled the highest demands of the script. Big-hearted Branagh is a natural charmer and he brings some real human sparkle to the seedy, superficial role created by the dyspeptic Osborne. Archie Rice is a junkshop of masculine frailties: a fast-talking, hard-drinking, tax-dodging, wife-discarding, narcissistic, loudmouthed wide boy whose sole redeeming quality is his bonhomie.

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Osborne’s great skill, bilious rhetoric, is the aptitude of the orator rather than the dramatist. His characters are animated by suffering, or by self-pity to be precise, but they never seem to grow or change. A good dramatic personality, like a good pie, emerges from the furnace in a radically altered state. But not Archie. The plot presents him with three problems — tax arrears, a needy mistress and a son in danger overseas — and they all develop in foreseeable ways. When he receives news of his bereavement, Archie responds by performing a blues number for his family’s delectation.