Kenneth Branagh, whose career has often shadowed that of Laurence Olivier, will tonight take over one of his predecessor’s stand-out characters: Archie Rice, the failing music hall comic in John Osborne’s 1957 play, The Entertainer.
Branagh’s revival shows that the part is still a catch for actors. But there is greater doubt over whether such a drama could – or should – be written today. The Entertainer is a prime example of the genre known as state-of-the-nation plays, a metaphor for the condition of the culture.
First seen on stage the year after Britain’s humiliation over the Suez canal, Archie Rice – touring seaside theatres often boastingly called the Empire or the Rex – is a surrogate for his country: crumpling, bankrupt, living on past glories. A clue that Osborne’s approach is metaphorical rather than journalistic is Archie being, unusually for his profession, a former public schoolboy. (Max Miller, one of the models for him, had left state school at the age of 12.)
As the Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro has shown, Hamlet and King Lear can be seen as state-of-the-nation plays, finding in far Denmark and ancient England subtle parallels for fears about invasion and the lottery of Royal succession that were convulsing the playwright’s country as he wrote.
However, the genre peaked in the decade or so after The Entertainer. Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On (1968), a satirical examination of changing postwar Britain, was set in a public school nudgingly called Albion. Soon afterwards came The National Health by Peter Nichols, set in an underfunded hospital.
Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians (1975) used a northern night school for aspiring standups as a setting for a stand-off between the forces of traditionalism and innovation. The play’s debate about the acceptability of jokes involving gender or race anticipated current worries.
The knack of the genre is to find a microcosm symbolic of wider goings-on. The newspaper industry, whose biggest titles have often claimed to speak for the nation, has been used as an allegory in a long print-run of scripts that includes Arnold Wesker’s The Journalists (1972), Howard Brenton and David Hare’s Pravda (1985), and Richard Bean’s phone-hacking drama, Great Britain (2014).
Although “Britain” is actually the surname of the protagonist, Bean’s title declared state-of-the-nation ambitions. By then, though, the form had become rare and problematic, mainly because ideas of nationhood were in such a state.
The United Kingdom now contains such distinct constituent populations – each further subdivided – that a dramatist has to define the location before analysing it. The Entertainer reflects a period when the terms “English” and “British” were used almost interchangeably, at least in England. Although Osborne was Welsh on his father’s side, in The Entertainer it is “England” that has been ruined by Suez, even though the rest of the UK shared the consequences of post-colonial overreach.
Such attitudes understandably encouraged devolution and independence movements, which resulted in, for instance, specific state-of-Scotland scripts, from John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil (1973) to Rona Munro’s eve-of-referendum The James Plays (2014). Similarly specific state-of-England plays were led by Hare’s Racing Demon (1990), its main characters bishops and clergy of the C of E, the country’s established but increasingly unworshipped church.
The risk of any theatrical time-piece is that it rapidly dates. But because Hare depicts a marginalisation of Anglicanism that has continued, the play has retained its relevance in revivals, further helped by the fact that the depicted religious tension between orthodoxy and reform apply just as strongly to political parties, the health system and broadcasting.
Some of the laments in The Entertainer – immigration, the venality of the Tories but ineffectuality of Labour, different rules for the poor and rich, and the idiocy of popular culture – also prove surprisingly enduring, suggesting that national dissatisfactions tend to take the same conservative-nostalgic form.
No modern playwright, though, could make an end-of-pier auditorium – and still less an NHS hospital or a school – a metaphor for wider Britain because the funding systems and policies across the UK are now so varied.
So, while The Entertainer may continue to be revived, especially around anniversaries of the Suez crisis, the library shelf to which it belongs now feels as rickety as the stages Archie Rice played. Any theatre hoping to sum up a country now would surely be drawn to the portmanteau form: a season of plays written by several authors variegated by gender, race, faith and (at the more far-thinking venues) even politics. But such a form – fragmented, contradictory, argumentative – does feels the right response to the state of the nation, or nations.
