Happy birthday to The Entertainer. The ultimate state-of-the-nation play is 50 years old. I’ve never quite bought the idea that Archie Rice, a failed music-hall comedian, is supposed to represent Britain’s decline as a superpower. A clapped-out comic to symbolise the death of a military hegemony? Don’t get it. But at the time this revolutionary play fomented a new kind of ambition for the theatre. A play was no longer just a play, it was a spiritual testament that reached beyond the foyer and into the streets, into the minds of the theatre-shunning majority, and captured the mood of the country. It also raised the dramatist to the status of seer, a dubious promotion which has caused great trouble ever since, leading writers into megalomania, audiences into fruitless boredom and producers into debt. A playwright may make a prophet but he won’t make a profit.
The difficulty with this state-of-the-nation stuff is that the state of the nation changes.
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