New Plays in Manhattan

The Entertainer (by John Osborne) must be regarded primarily as Sir Laurence Olivier's evening. But. whatever its weaknesses, the play is still by England's most interesting new playwright in years. This time the author of Look Back in Anger has no brilliantly disgruntled intellectual for a hero, but a flabbily disintegrating vaudevillian. On the music hall stage Archie Rice is a cheap-Jack with rancid jokes and forced jauntiness, whose very vulgarity lacks drive. In theatrical digs he is a shoddy, cynical family man, exploiting those who love him and embossing betrayal with abuse. Even with his back to the wall, he can somehow see the writing on it.

Olivier has caught Archie's makeup in all its rich, mangy detail, whether the scared swagger or the seedy lewdness, and has portrayed an out-at-elbows flop yammering that the world is out of joint. Of the vivid details Olivier makes a firm design; from a richly unsavory character part he forges a vital character. Indeed. as staged by Tony Richardson, the whole production scores--in Joan Plowright's protesting daughter, George Relph's old-school-actor father, and notably in Brenda de Banzie's distraught, put-upon wife.

Though needing so expert a production, The Entertainer can be too easily written off as a play. With its alternating home life and vaudeville turns, it can misleadingly seem at times less play than stunt. The writing lacks the brilliant crackle of Osborne's earlier play. Where the hero of Look Back has a superb talent for abuse, Archie Rice turns meanly abusive from having no talent for anything. And where Look Back boasts a stingingly real attitude but has increasingly factitious situations, The Entertainer boasts a genuine situation but everywhere strains for an attitude. Its attempt to enlarge its characters into social symbols, to enfold its cheap-Jack in the Union Jack and pass off a grubby slice of life as contemporary England, never succeeds.

The truth is that, unlike Look Back, The Entertainer deals not with society but with humanity. It is thus less topical and theatrically fresh. It is no snarling trumpet call to inaction, but the whiny yet at times affecting fiddling of a somewhat hackneyed yet not bogus tune. It is oddly unified, its twanged and tawdry stage scenes harmonizing perfectly with its family ones. Compared to Look Back, where people swim flashingly about in a heavy surf of resentment. The Entertainer's is a static little world in which people without very much showmanship drown.

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"I don't sing or dance very well, you understand.'' says Sir Laurence Olivier of his performance in The Entertainer. "But fortunately, I play a very bad entertainer."

At first Olivier was infuriated by Playwright Osborne's vitriolic Look Back in Anger (now in its fifth month on Broadway). But, says he, "the second time I saw it the scales descended from my eyes.'' Sir Laurence asked Osborne to write The Entertainer for him. bowed out of a starring role in Hollywood's film version of Separate Tables. In a tiny London theater he opened in Osborne's play at a salary of $126 a week. "I still disapprove of Osborne's social doctrines." says Olivier. "But I consider him a highly talented playwright. He has the skill to express the feelings of his characters who are unable to communicate with one another.''

After the eight-week Broadway run of The Entertainer, Sir Laurence will hurry to Scotland to catch the moors in a properly misty mood for his movie Macbeth. As in his other three Shakespearian movies (Henry V, Hamlet, Richard III), he will produce, direct and star.

Cloud 7 (by Max Wilk) is a comedy about Newton Reece (Ralph Meeker), 39, married, commuter, on the rise with United Foods, who one day, tired of it all, throws up his job. He goes home to Connecticut with no future plans beyond Do-It-Yourselfing in a chair and making love to his wife (Martha Scott) in the daytime. He also tries his hand at baking brownies, urges a drab, neglected neighbor's wife to turn slinky, encourages a job-weary laundryman to rebel, gets a lady writer to turn soulful. When the boss (amusingly played by John McGiver) comes after him. he agrees to go back to work, but quickly quits again.

The play's whole Birds Eye view of commuter life is by now so familiar as to need to be either freshly observed or gorgeously exaggerated. In Cloud 7 it gets hardly more than a look and a promise. Cloud 7 is not only not a proper suburban satire or farce; it is not playwriting.

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