The Entertainer - Softcover

Osborne, John

3.34

275 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571063675 ISBN 13: 9780571063673

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1974

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

This play about the life and work of a second-rate music hall comic (brilliantly created by Sir Laurence Olivier in the original production) and staged only eleven months after the opening of Look Back in Anger, secured John Osborne's reputation and has become a classic of 20th century drama.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Osborne elided the ailing world of the variety hall with microcosmic slices of troubled family life, creating a portrait of a disintegrating artist and a state-of-the-nation play at the same time. (Telegraph)

Those seeking a night of laugh-out-loud entertainment, though, be warned: if they do, the joke’s on them. National decline and personal failure is, now as then, at root a serious business. (Telegraph)

There couldn't be a better moment for a revival of John Osborne's The Entertainer – that great, smouldering cry of anguish at Britain's changing face and its loss of identity in a post-imperial world. (What's On Stage)

Rice is the clapped-out vaudevillian who personifies the decline of Britain in a piece, set during the Suez crisis, that draws a potent parallel between the last gasp of the music hall tradition and the fag end of imperial power. (Independent)

Osborne's evocative portrait of a man – and a nation – in freefall. (The Stage)

The brilliance of Osborne’s play lies in its use of the dying music hall as a metaphor for the declining British empire. Osborne’s protagonist, Rice, is a clapped-out comic staving off bankruptcy as he tours a shoddy nude revue round the halls. But Osborne was also writing at the moment when the illegal British seizing of the Suez canal, about to be nationalised by Colonel Nasser, looked like a last desperate throw of the imperial dice and divided the country. All that is represented in the play when Archie’s dad, Billy, laments the way the Brits are pushed around by foreigners even as daughter Jean has joined the passionate anti-Suez protests in Trafalgar Square. If ever there was a state-of-the-nation play, this is it. (Guardian)

Book Description:

The Entertainer by John Osborne is the play which secured Osborne's reputation, and has come to be regarded as a classic of twentieth-century drama.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.