Now is the Monday of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of Nokia!
Yes Tuesday found a nice man at the front door delivering my new moby. Now don't get me wrong I ain't putting the diss on my Sony Ericsson which is a lovely little phone but the navigation joystick really wasn't made to last 18 months... and it did have an annoying habit of connecting to the Internet willy-nilly so now I have this shiny sleek number. I am enjoying getting to know the way around it and all it's uses but already am missing the Sony Ericsson's extra-bright light - so handy for reading labels on the poster tubes at the bottom of the piles at work - and also this new phone leaves a big border all around the pictures chosen as wallpaper. Pah.

It is also a bit pissy that a phone that revels in it's music-playing and photo-taking possibilities does not come with a USB cable to facilitate same. Mrs. Vodafone is sending me one for an extra £10. The knobbers.
Later that evening the walking miracle that is Owen and my own self went to the Old Vic to see the 50th anniversary staging of John Osborne's THE ENTERTAINER. Now thereby hangs a tale...

When I heard it was to be revived with Robert Lindsay and Pam Ferris I thought that's one I can happily avoid but then my GUYS AND DOLLS hero John Normington was cast in the role of Billy Rice and I badgered Owen into getting tickets for later in the run. Two days after booking them John pulled out of the production for the remainder of it's run due to an undisclosed illness. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was, especially as he had received some of his best ever notices when it opened (here he is with the rest of the main cast).
I was in two minds whether to go or not but as I had never seen it before - either on stage or the film - I thought I might as well. I must admit to not being a big Osborne fan. LOOK BACK IN ANGER in particular has always left me cold and suspect that the further we get away from 1956 and the impact that play had on British Theatre the less his plays will be performed.

THE ENTERTAINER is by far a better play than LOOK BACK.. with at least some depth given to the female roles. Robert Lindsay takes on the main role of Archie Rice the bankrupt - morally and financially - fading star of a tatty Music Hall show playing to half-empty houses in his own home town at the time of the Suez crisis. His children are all affected by the war, his daughter Jean (Emma Cunliffe) who lives in London has returned to stay a few days after arguing with her stuffy fiancee about her attending an anti-war rally, his son Frank (David Dawson) is drifting since serving a jail sentence as a conscientious objector and his other son Mick is being held prisoner by the Egyptians. Also living in the cramped flat is his doddery querulous father Billy (now David Baron) who was a genuine Music Hall star in it's glory years and his boozy rattled wife Phoebe (Pam Ferris). Like the married couple in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF Archie's family don't so much live together as inhabit the same cage.

I have always found Robert Lindsay a strangely unlikeable actor so this part is tailor-made for him but his larger-than-life personality seems to also work against the role, his scenes onstage cracking lame gags and supposedly dying on his arse were met by huge laughs and large rounds of applause. I also couldn't believe that Lindsay's Archie had the character's self-awareness of his own artistic mediocrity and so the famous last lines "You've been a good audience. Let me know where you're working tomorrow night and I'll come and see you" had none of the curdling sarcasm they deserve.

Emma Cunliffe was also a bit of a worry playing the troubled daughter Jean with an emphasis as if aware that her projection wouldn't make it to the Dress Circle. She did get better towards the end though. Sadly David Baron played Billy with a deliberate stageiness too, at times he seemed to be playing him like an old brigadier-colonel. I was watching him but imagining John in the role and I know he would have not been afraid to play up Billy's unlikeable traits and brought a shabby, cantankerous, needling quality to the character.

More of an impression was made by David Dawson's Frank, flinching every time Archie moved towards him and obviously more damaged by his stint in prison than anyone around him can recognise. But the real star of the show is Pam Ferris who makes Phoebe a tragic cartoonish mess. Knocking back the gin as sedately as she thinks she can get away with, forever on the verge of hysterical laughter or maudlin tears, she delivers several memorable moments - sudden bursts of volcanic anger, first at a perceived slight from Jean and then at Billy for daring to touch the cake she has bought specially for Mick's return; her reminiscences of Archie's more refined brother who always said her name so exquisitely and finally, in the middle of a drunken nerve-frayed party for the absent Mick she sings "The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery" with a tender simplicity that she diffuses with a shrug and a return to the gin bottle.

Sadly director Sean Holmes' pace is fairly pedestrian and in particular the main second act scene of the party to celebrate Mick's imminent return home seemed to have no motor to it despite the many arguments and plot revelations. The end of the scene, Frank's anguished announcement that Mick has been killed, would suit most dramatists but Osborn gives us a further act which given the further dramatic events within it still seems to drag. A pity really as at times it was easy to imagine just how disturbing the play must have been 1n 1957 a year after Suez.