It is not true to say that this is the first production to be seen in Ireland of what many regard as John Osborne's best play. The Entertainer was staged in the Olympia in the early 1960s by an English touring company - a production that was not exactly gripping. But the New Theatre Company's new production here catches honestly and well the bleak spirit and incoherent rage of the play despite some rather uneven lighting and acting and occasional Irish lapses from Osborne's very English text and accents.
The author's rage is about what he saw as the English nation losing its way and its sense of purpose and the bleak spirit infuses what he sees as the glum acceptance and lack of commitment of the English nation in the mid-1950s, around the time of the Suez crisis. Archie Rice is the almost wholly unsuccessful music hall comedian who embodies the lot and the anger is articulated through alcohol by his dispirited wife Phoebe and his briefly politically active daughter Jean. The old English spirit and sense of identity is embodied in Archie's successful and popular father, Billy, who got out of music hall when he saw that it was a dying entertainment, and, maybe, in Archie's son Mick, who went out to serve in Suez when his brother Frank was indifferent enough to refuse such service. Overall, this is glum stuff. Ronan Wilmot may have taken on a bit too much in sharing the direction with David Murray while also playing the savagely mordant Archie. But he catches the spirit and meaning of the play even when, in his songs, he occasionally misses the notes and the rhythms. Marie McNamara is his distressful wife and Lorraine Horgan his distressed daughter. Terence Orr has some problems with Billy if only because he looks younger than his son Archie, and sometimes he seems to whinge more than boast, while Shane Carr's young Frank is all apparent indifference. But more than 40 years on, Osborne's play is still pertinent and always interesting and this production captures more than a mere whiff of its originality of purpose.
Runs until June 16th. Booking at 016703361.
