‘Call me Larry’

Fifty years ago, the Royal Court theatre detonated its second H-bomb. The first had been Look Back in Anger, in 1956. The next was The Entertainer, John Osborne’s follow-up play, which opened 50 years ago in April. Out were blown the West End play’s French windows and in came the kitchen sink. The memorable first line of the play — ‘Bloody Poles and Irish! I hate the bastards’ — set the tone for an unsavoury evening which ushered in a whole new drama movement. Noël Coward loathed it.

The shock back in 1957 was perhaps not so much the play itself but Laurence Olivier’s part in it. Here was the knighted legend of the classicaltheatre slumming it as Archie Rice, a washed-up song-and-gag man (and more than a bit of a bastard) who dominates a play about a fractious family of vaudevillians living on the English coast. These days we are used to stifling a yawn when classical actors do telly soaps or panto: Ian McKellen is Widow Twankey one week, King Lear the next.