“Don’t clap too hard,” Kenneth Branagh tells the audience. “It’s a very old building.”If the joke is gets any reaction, it’s worth repeating, and his character Archie Rice dutifully trots it out again during “The Entertainer” in London.Archie is referring to old music halls. Still, the 127-year-old Garrick Theatre also survived the warm press-night applause for the show, the last of the Kenneth Branagh company’s seven-play season there.The 55-year-old theatrical knight’s performance invites comparison with Laurence Olivier in the role written for him in 1957 by John Osborne. At least based on the 1960 film version, Olivier is impeccable in capturing the complexity of the character who both loves and hates his life on the boards, who survives by avoiding income tax for decades but is prepared to face ruin and jail rather than accept a family financial lifeline and move to Canada to run a new hotel.Any actor needs to balance Archie’s contrary statements: one minute he is suggesting that he is dead between the eyes and has no emotion left. The next, he is lustily chasing women as young as his daughter and showing us that he has a nice line in tap dancing – almost too perfect for someone who is supposed to be a failed star desperately peddling soft-porn and girlie revues. A least Archie’s jokes are appropriately awful, on a par with Arthur Atkinson in “The Fast Show.” One almost expects Archie to be asking “where’s me washboard?”Still, Branagh just about pips Robert Lindsay, who took on the part at the Old Vic in 2007.The song and dance numbers are sadly kept short, as loaded with innuendo as any “Carry On” film. These mesh into family scenes that come conveniently primed with booze-filled rows. These are slowly drawn out, with Greta Scacchi sensitively playing Archie’s wife Phoebe, who has to cope with his multiple affairs, and Gawn Grainger as the father Billy, forever intoning “Onward Christian Soldiers” in his dotage. The subplots of Archie’s daughter breaking her engagement and his son Mick’s disappearance seem bolted on.Director Rob Ashford frames the whole thing with Archie’s entrance and exit into the limelight. If some of the intervening action drags, Ashford makes the most of the zeitgeist of the piece. Osborne was drawing parallels between the state of Music-Hall evenings and the condition of England in the years post empire. Cue some dilapidated props, union flags and Britannia images. The 2016 audience comes away with comparisons between the state of Britain’s union and its place in the period after the Brexit referendum. The original was set about the time of the Suez crisis and protests in Trafalgar Square. This leads to plenty of hints about another crisis in the Middle East and concern about austerity. Like Pinter writing of the same era, not everything has dated well, with plenty of racial references- say, on an influx of Polish workers - now likely to have some audience members squirming.Archie and his dad, both entertainers, are left with the consolation that it is better to be a has-been rather than a never-been. As a revival, better that this has been shown rather than never been.Branagh’s season at the Garrick has been a delight. Rather than put this in the past tense, go see and judge. Archie Rice walks off into the middle distance as the spotlight dims on the musical hall, Britain and perhaps the notion that Sir Ken can one day outshine Sir Larry. He doesn’t, but at least he has a good go.“The Entertainer” runs at the Garrick Theatre, 2 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0HH, through November 12. It will be broadcast live to cinemas across the UK and internationally on October 27.
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