Soon the Royal Court will be giving us David Hare’s Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, Christopher Hampton’s Total Eclipse, Caryl Churchill’s A Number, Jez Butterworth’s Mojo and Sarah Kane’s terrifying Blasted, as well as Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead and Sam Shepard’s Geography of a Horse Dreamer, both directed by their authors. But the rehearsed readings of 50 selected offerings from the theatre’s last half-century began this week with something other than the seemingly inevitable Look Back in Anger. It was a slightly later play by John Osborne, directed by Hare and starring Robert Lindsay as the down-at-heel comedian originally performed by Laurence Olivier, that got these one-night stands off to a terrific start.
Shorn of the elaborate designs The Entertainer had always seemed to require, reduced to actors perched with their scripts in the most puritanical chairs even the Court could find, the play packed far more punch than I had expected. After all, it was first performed in 1957, when the nation was still reeling from the fiasco at Suez. Indeed, one of its characters has been demonstrating against such imperialist throwbacks in Trafalgar Square. So was the rehearsed reading simply a rueful salute to both our and the Court’s history?
Despite the play’s loquaciousness, not at all. For one thing, Lindsay’s Archie Rice had the makings of a major performance. Actually, more than the makings, for it was already a dark, disturbing portrait of someone who had lost his self-belief and self-respect. Here was an Archie who could shrug and quip and tell dirty jokes and scornfully sing “why should I care?” — but behind the empty laughter was a deeply angry, embittered man.
There was obviously room for Lindsay to develop his reading, but he was pretty close to mastering his lines, for his eyes were mostly off the script he was holding and, when song-and-dance was needed, his voice and his toes managed both unaided. But then the whole affair seemed marvellously fresh. It left me aware, as never before, that Osborne was writing about disintegration and decay on four levels: the man, his family, the musical hall and, symbolised by them all, the England seemed to belong to moribund politicians fighting hopeless colonial wars, like the one in Cyprus that kills Archie’s soldier son.
The performers also included Anna Maxwell-Martin and Tom Riley, Pam Ferris as Archie’s emotionally scattered wife and Sam Kelly as a father who, far from being the nice Edwardian leftover I’d assumed, came across interestingly as a cantankerous xenophobe, racist and homophobe custom-built to cure any nostalgia for the 1950s. If you want to understand why Osborne despised his lower-middle-class origins in Fulham — well, this all-too-authentic portrait of an unhappy, quarrelsome, boozy family should help you.
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