I have always thought The Entertainer, with its use of the dying music hall as a metaphor for British imperialism, to be John Osborne's finest play. Like all classics, it is also capable of endless reinterpretation; and David Freeman's extraordinary production brings out, more clearly than any version I have seen, the play's roots in both Suez and Strindberg.
Osborne wrote the play during the Suez crisis of 1956 and Freeman intersperses the scenes with newsreel footage that is both historically fascinating and devastatingly topical: the chauvinist support for "our boys", the implied disdain for the United Nations and the patronising attitude towards the Middle East, with its glimpse of "primitive" Egyptian potters, shows how little popular attitudes have changed. Freeman also dovetails the footage brilliantly with Osborne's action so that the humiliation of Anthony Eden, who had the aura of an Edwardian matinee idol, leads directly into the death of the music-hall old-timer, Billy Rice.
But it is Billy's son, Archie, who is the play's beating heart; and the first thing to say about David Threlfall is that he escapes completely from the shadow of Olivier. With his receding hair, apologetic moustache and loping frame, he looks like every music-hall second-rater you ever saw: at one point entering with pith- helmet and butterfly net and at another in a print frock and hobnail boots. And, like many comics, Threlfall allows his stage persona to invade his domestic life, crossing and uncrossing his long rubbery legs in mock embarrassment as his father and daughter argue about Suez.
It is a dazzlingly inventive performance that reveals Archie's inner emptiness. But Freeman pushes the domestic scenes too far in the direction of Strindbergian torment, and the use of overlapping dialogue obscures key lines such as daughter Jean's withering anti-Royal reference to "a gloved hand waving at you from a golden coach". And Archie's sins are already sufficient without the suggestion that he also sexually abuses his daughter.
But Tom Phillips's design marvellously combines historical accuracy with stylised expressionism so that, at the end, the beleaguered Archie is confronted by a succession of locked doors. And, by eliminating a couple of minor characters, Freeman tidies up the play's structure and focuses attention on Archie's dysfunctional family. In particular, he brings out the mutual aggression between Anna Keaveney's working-class Phoebe and Anna Tolputt's politically militant Jean, and turns Robert David MacDonald's elegant Billy into a distraught observer of ritualistic family rows. But it is the symbiosis between the domestic war and the national shambles of Suez that makes this a defining production.
· Until May 24. Box office: 01332 363275.
