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 By John Osbourne
Musical Director
Derby Playhouse
Director: David Freeman
Archie Rice is a music hall comic who’s past the good times and is reduced to providing light entertainment in front of naked girls.
Set in 1956 with a backdrop of the Suez crisis and the uncertainty of the fate of one of his sons in the conflict, Archie is trying however he can, to avoid the imminent arrival of the tax man, bankruptcy and a spell in prison.
The only way that he, his second wife Phoebe, children Jean and Frank and father Billy handle the situation is to consume inordinate amounts of gin and fall through life in a drunken stupor.
The Entertainer was Kelvin’s first production at the Derby Playhouse since 1993, finding himself, this time, on stage as opposed to in the pit, playing the ‘straight man’ MD to David Threlfall’s Archie Rice.
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