Great performances: Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer

Every time I invoke the name of Olivier, which I do frequently, someone always counters with Marlon Brando. But while Brando was a superb screen actor, he never played Hamlet, Lear or Macbeth on stage, and it’s not easy to imagine him as the third-rate comic, Archie Rice, in John Osborne’s play The Entertainer. You can still see Olivier’s performance in the Tony Richardson film version. While it’s a valuable record, however, it cannot recapture the magnetism of the stage performance, with its mixture of physical bravura and deep despair.

Olivier’s genius lay partly in his ability to combine external detail with internal truth. Everything about Olivier’s Archie looked right from the moment you first saw him: the check suit, the bow tie, the white socks, the grey bowler hat. But Olivier, who frequented the old Collins’ Music Hall before starting rehearsals, didn’t just get the costume right. He once described himself as a born “pub entertainer”, and also caught the seedy heroism of the standup comic. He clearly relished the buck-and-wing dances. He periodically essayed an affected poshness. Above all, he pinned down the sexual ambivalence of a 1950s comic. With hand coyly posed on hip, Olivier would give the audience an epicene leer and say: “You think I’m like that, don’t you? You think I am! Well, I’m not. But (pointing at the conductor) HE is.”

What Olivier realised early on is that the character carries his rat-a-tat, front-cloth patter over into his domestic life: I remember his Archie entering his digs at hectic speed and treating his wife, daughter and father as if they were part of his audience. But the real greatness of the performance lay in one simple fact: as the buoyancy in Archie’s public persona slowly faded, so Olivier showed the pain of the private man confronted not just by a failing career, but also by the death of his son at Suez. At the end of the second act, as Archie sang the blues, Olivier’s body slowly crumpled as he slid down the side of the proscenium arch. It remains one of the great images of modern theatre and as moving as anything in his Macbeth.

Olivier’s performance was momentous in many ways: it was the first sign of the theatrical establishment of the day embracing the Royal Court and marked a decisive shift in the life and career of the actor himself, as his marriage to Vivien Leigh broke up and he embarked in new directions. I’ve seen many fine Archie Rices since Olivier, including Robert Lindsay at the Old Vic in 2007, but nothing can ever quite match the memory of a performance that revealed the spiritual desolation behind the garish mask of the raffish entertainer.