Theatre review: The Entertainer

If the whole point of SirKenBran's eponymous, year-long residency at the Garrick was to prove that he could programme a whole season and actually remember to turn up for the whole thing, then it looks like a success. If we're also meant to take into account the actual shows, though, this has made Michael Grandage's underwhelming West End season of a few years ago seem like a resounding triumph in comparison. For the finale SirKenBran lets Rob Ashford take the directing reins on his own, while he himself takes on the lead role in John Osborne's The Entertainer, a part the playwright himself once told him he should play. Of course, Osborne's been dead for over twenty years so he probably wouldn't be too offended if his suggestion had been ignored, and maybe SirKenBran should have thought instead of the living who actually have to sit through it every night. He plays Archie Rice, a music hall entertainer who followed his father Billy into showbusiness.

Theatre review: A Subject of Scandal and Concern

Theatre seems currently interested in reminding me of things I could have been arrested for if I'd been born decades or centuries earlier - the gay thing and the depressive thing on Friday, and today the atheism thing, as John Osborne tells the story of the last trial for blasphemy in England. A Subject of Scandal and Concern was originally written for television, and this stage adaptation hasn't been seen in London before, making Jimmy Walters' production another of the Finborough's trademark rediscoveries. The setting is 1842 Gloucestershire, where poor teacher George Jacob Holyoake (Jamie Muscato) is holding a lecture. He has a speech impediment and a tendency to dry up mid-speech, but despite being a poor speaker he's in demand to do so, as few other Socialists are willing to give public lectures.

Non-review: Playwright's Playwrights - Look Back in Anger

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is surely the best-known of the four "Playwright's Playwrights" readings being presented by the Royal Court at the Duke of York's. It's so iconic that despite hot having seen it on stage before, the first act especially was very familiar to me, and I know I'm not the only person who found that to be the case. (In fact this familiarity did mean this week's reading lacked one of the joys of last week's, of the cast discovering the play as the audience do.) But the reason the theatre was, in stark contrast to last week's sparse but enthusiastic crowd, packed to the rafters today wasn't entirely to do with the play: It had been announced that Benedict Cumberbatch would play the archetypal Angry Young Man, Jimmy Porter, and St Martin's Lane was packed with fans long before kick-off. Jimmy lives in a small apartment with wife Alison (Rebecca Hall) and their friend Cliff (handsome Welshman Matt Ryan.) These two help each other bear the brunt of Jimmy's constant furious outbursts, taking out his frustrations about life in general on the pair of them. The combination of Alison becoming pregnant, and the arrival of her old friend Helena (Anna Maxwell Martin) coming to visit, effects a change in the status quo.

Theatre review: The Devil Inside Him

I was originally meant to be seeing Written on the Heart tonight, but of course that show took an early bath, leaving me with an empty day in my diary. Being a total addict, the prospect of three theatre-free nights in a row was a bit scary, so I settled on the White Bear, a theatre I've not had the best luck with in the past, but I figured was due another chance. John Osborne's playwrighting debut, co-written with Stella Linden¹, was only recently unearthed in the British Library. Although showing signs of being an early work, if Hannah Joss' production is anything to go by it's been worth rediscovering. Set in the world's most oppressive guest house The Devil Inside Him shows us life in a remote Welsh village in the 1950s, where a hellfire-spouting Methodist minister lords it over his flock.