Contemporary Arts
Coming Unstuck
The Entertainer. By John Osborne. (Royal Court.) — Zuleika. (Saville.) THE successor of Look Back in Anger lives up to its title—it is very entertaining. As a play it is a brilliant disappointment. Its hero is a dead-beat seaside comedian- manager, Archie Rice. He has a faded, common wife whom he betrays with his own chorus girls in the parlour, a son who is killed by the Egyptians after the Suez landings, an old father, one of the last of the old-stagers, whom he lures back on to the boards in a final effort to stave off his credi- tors, and a daughter disgusted with the whole sordid set-up and, incidentally, poor Sir Anthony, over whose policies she has quarrelled with her boy-friend. Add a preoccupation with sexual nor- mality, some scatological reminiscences, a nude, a lot of class hatred, and a number of rather good music-hall songs and you have the raw material of the evening. It is worked up into the form of one of Archie's own shows—a series of scenes compered by himself. The contrast between his seedy geniality on the stage and his even seedier disillusionment off it is very telling, but it comes a bit too near the bone—the play is itself apt to appear as just a series of turns cleverly organised so that the chief star comes on often enough to keep the audience happy.
On this level The Entertainer is a pretty good effort. The dialogue is, as before, very brilliant indeed, the dirty jokes are sometimes very funny, Sir Laurence Olivier has the plum lines and plenty of opportunity for capers. These are avidly and magnificently grasped; in fact, one will be lucky if one is so spellbound by the sheer acting of n whole cast more than once in a lifetime. Sir Laurence a glib, effervescent, bloody-minded failure; Brenda de Banzie a poor frayed, fiddle- string played nearly to breaking point; George Relph careful, proud, meandering and a fearful bore; Dorothy Tutin a worried visitor from the outside world; all play with a wonderful self- effacing fervour. For twenty minutes or so to- wards the end of the second act in which he turns from a desperate tipsy hilarity to a pathetic cry of pain as the news of his son's death is brought to him, Olivier dances us through an almost in- credible range of feeling. It would be very un- gracious not to acknowledge that he was doing so at Mr. Osborne's piping. This is probably the finest acting part in English written since the war.
Is it, though, so very unreasonable to feel acutely irritated that Mr. Osborne has not gone on from Look Back in Anger? It is his merits that make the thing so tantalising—in particular that of having caught to perfection and heightened, as a playwright must, the • slang which ordinary people use; its impact is far from ordinary, in fact so extraordinary that it has been mistaken for the voice of a prophet. But the defects are still there as glaring as ever—and exactly the same ones as vitiated the earlier play. There is the same im- plausibility about the origins of the characters (in acutely class-conscious plays like these this is very important); apart from a few gimmicks the con- struction of the thing is a horrible mess—long, arid stretches, short cut-about snippets, again that almost Meaningless superfluous character; again only one character is much more than a type- mask. All these are things which a stern critic in
the household and a determination not to write anything in a hurry might easily cure.
What is much more serious and might have frightful effects later on is a tendency to pander to critics who demand a drama which shall be in the narrow sense engaged. There is an air of con- trivedness (to complain of nothing else) about the snide cracks at the rich, the Suez crisis and the Royal Family which pepper the play, a pathetic underlying belief that one can add contemporane- ity like milk in tea and that it makes the play any better to do so. In a symposium in this month's issue of the London Magazine (which ought to be compulsory reading for the 'engagement' fana- tics) Mr. Osborne seems to realise that this is a fallacy, arguing that his task is not to talk about Hungary and the Rosenbergs but to try to get culture across to 'the monster in the ash-can' (as he picturesquely calls ordinary working people) in a language it can understand. He is well on the way to finding such a language and that, as I have argued, is his greatest achievement; there remains the question of what he is going to say when he has found it. If The Entertainer is the answer, it is not going to get him very far. He is presenting to the monster in the ash-can a middle-class dilemma it has never seen before, he is con- descendingly assuming that it can stomach most easily jokes of the four-letter type, and he is cramming down its throat a few constipating sops to keep its class consciousness happy.
Mr. Osborne is in two difficulties : first, to decide whose ears he is really aiming at, and, second, to try with his trail of phosphorescent paint, his dialogue, to picture human beings with- out anger. Whether he knows enough about ordin- ary working people to accomplish what he wants under the first head I 'aon't know, and as for the second it is of course much easier to snipe at class or Suez or Royalty than successfully to draw a picture of men and women in whose personality these things have become a piece of background, significant but subordinate to the fact that they are humans with timeless problems. For an enfant terrible with a reputation to keep up it is more difficult still. As Archie remarks in The Enter- tainer, 'They'll be putting labels on you soon, my girl, and then you'll be done for.' If only Mr. Osborne could unstick his.
Zuleika Dobson has taken a long time to reach the London stage when you come to think of it. One would have thought she was pretty much of a cinch. It turns out in fact that the waverers have been right after all, for it is practically impossible to get Beerbohm's irony on to the stage. Still, the story makes a good peg on which to hang some
delightful 'period' business, some pleasant but not sufficiently outrageous sets and costumes by Osbert Lancaster, and one or two good tunes by Peter Tranchell. A godsend for an eligible young man to take a deb to.
DAVID WATT
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