The Entertainer - Brossura

Osborne, John

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0571335144 ISBN 13: 9780571335145

Casa editrice: Faber & Faber, 2016

Riassunto

Set against the backdrop of post-war Britain, John Osborne's The Entertainer conjures the seedy glamour of the old music halls for an explosive examination of public masks and private torment. First staged at the Royal Court Theatre, London, only eleven months after the opening of Look Back in Anger, the play has become a classic of twentieth-century drama.

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Recensione:

Osborne elided the ailing world of the variety hall with microcosmic slices of troubled family life, creating a portrait of a disintegrating artist and a state-of-the-nation play at the same time. (Telegraph)

Those seeking a night of laugh-out-loud entertainment, though, be warned: if they do, the joke's on them. National decline and personal failure is, now as then, at root a serious business. (Telegraph)

There couldn't be a better moment for a revival of John Osborne's The Entertainer - that great, smouldering cry of anguish at Britain's changing face and its loss of identity in a post-imperial world. (What's On Stage)

Rice is the clapped-out vaudevillian who personifies the decline of Britain in a piece, set during the Suez crisis, that draws a potent parallel between the last gasp of the music hall tradition and the fag end of imperial power. (Independent)

Osborne's evocative portrait of a man - and a nation - in freefall. (The Stage)

The brilliance of Osborne's play lies in its use of the dying music hall as a metaphor for the declining British empire. Osborne's protagonist, Rice, is a clapped-out comic staving off bankruptcy as he tours a shoddy nude revue round the halls. But Osborne was also writing at the moment when the illegal British seizing of the Suez canal, about to be nationalised by Colonel Nasser, looked like a last desperate throw of the imperial dice and divided the country. All that is represented in the play when Archie's dad, Billy, laments the way the Brits are pushed around by foreigners even as daughter Jean has joined the passionate anti-Suez protests in Trafalgar Square. If ever there was a state-of-the-nation play, this is it. (Guardian)

L'autore:

John Osborne was born in London in 1929. Before becoming a playwright he worked as a journalist, assistant stage manager and repertory theatre actor. Seeing an advertisement for new plays in The Stage in 1956, Osborne submitted Look Back in Anger. Not only was the play produced, but it was to become considered as the turning point in post-war British theatre. Osborne's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, captured the rebelliousness of an entire post-war generation of 'angry young men'. His other plays include The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964), and A Patriot for Me (1966). He also wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991) published together as Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise. His last play, Deja Vu (1991), returns to the characters of Look Back in Anger, over thirty years later. Both Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer were adapted for film, and in 1963 Osborne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones. John Osborne died on 24 December 1994.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Faber & Faber
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0571335144
• ISBN 13: 9780571335145
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 112