Every so often, the Citizens' Theatre grabs a musty old standard, blows the dust of it and jolts it into vigorous contemporary life. Philip Prowse did it a few years ago with Cavalcade, Noël Coward's unwieldy patriotic pageant that became a lean and mean fin de siècle statement. Now Caroline Paterson has done the same with John Osborne's 1957 tirade against a Britain crumbling into post-empire inertia as fast as audiences were leaving the music halls.
Her masterstroke is to realise that for a brief window of time - perhaps just the length of the production's three-week run - The Entertainer is one of the most pertinent plays any British theatre could put on. When Jean Rice, daughter of the iconic Archie Rice, talks about trouble in the Middle East and how she's been on a peace rally in Trafalgar Square despite never being interested in politics before, the effect is electrifying.
Instantly, this is a play for today and Paterson gives us a soundtrack of bombs and explosions to drive home her point. It's as if Osborne's characters - already dead souls grinding their way through a life of very 1950s existential despair - are ghosts reaching out to us across five decades, warning us to learn from history. The effect is emphasised by Kenny Miller's set, which places the Rice's front parlour in a black box upstage in a way thatdistances us from the actors. At its worst, this dulls the impact of what they're saying; at its best, it's as if the domestic scenes are in quotation marks, a vision of the past teleported in for us to examine in the context of today.
When Archie (Sean Scanlan), a figure of resigned desperation in a blazer with painted-on stripes, delivers his sad, funny variety routines, he's joined by two chorus girls in blonde wigs and fishnets, addled and inhumanly sexy. If Scanlan gives a good imitation of charisma rather than actually being charismatic, he is nonetheless a powerful symbol of selfish self-destruction and a formidable counterweight to the passion of Jean Rice, played by a tough and elegant Kate Dickie. And how better to encapsulate Osborne's vision of the death of hope than a bizarre interpretation of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, with its desolate refrain: "Here we are now, entertain us"?
· Until April 5. Box office: 0141-429 0022
