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. Watching Sean Holmes’s stylishly spare production I was struck by the stifling gloom that overhangs the play, the nervous anxiety about whether England could cope without an empire. At the time no one knew how things would turn out. Now we do. And things turned out OK. So a central tension is missing, a vital string on the grand piano has snapped and when the show strikes a chord of collective fear all you get, instead of a satisfying ripple of distress, is a vague dull twonk.
And the play broke so much new ground that it may also have dug its own grave. Its kitchen-sink setting contributed to the birth of TV drama, and whether or not you enjoy a weekly dose of soap I doubt if you’ll be diverted by this pre-Cambrian relic of the genre.
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