JOHN Osborne’s play, The Entertainer, starring Sir Laurence Olivier as a third-rate music-hall performer, Archie Rice, had been a huge hit in London, and audiences elsewhere were eager to see it when Olivier took it on tour.

It arrived at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, on November 4, 1957. Our drama critic Christopher Small was hugely impressed by what he saw. “Roused now”, he wrote, “by the spectacle of a broken-down, drunken, hopeless music-hall performer going even further down the hill ... [the play] has taken shape in something not precisely sad ... and not, except for the most sardonic taste, funny; but enormously, brilliantly, stunningly theatrical. In the present state of the theatre it would be foolish to ask more.

“... No doubt there is an element in the fascination of [Olivier’s] performance of schadenfreude; to see the great man, knighthood and all, going through the routine of a fill-in act at the end of the pier.

“But it is not long before any such feeling is lost in the realisation of Sir Laurence’s genuine greatness; which can take this unhappy wretch, display him, make him grow ten times as large as life, show us a glimpse ... of the rage and frustration inside him; lift him for a moment or two, if not to tragic height to a place where our emotions follow every gesture and sound, while we hold our breath”.

In an interview with Olivier (who is pictured, above, with his co-stars Joan Plowright, Brenda de Banzie and Eric Relph), Small acknowledged the “uncertain” condition of theatres outside London. Why, he wondered, should The Entertainer – part of which was a cruel caricature of provincial entertainment, be taken, even briefly, round the provinces?

Sir Laurence said he had brought this production on tour to relatively unsophisticated audiences, because he loved them. If leading actors could more regularly take established successes around the country, an interest in the theatre would be more easily kept alive, with obvious long-term benefits for any permanent local theatre companies.

Sir Laurence spoke of the “new enemies of the theatre” - the financial requirements of the theatre business and the effect of cinema, TV, and what was referred to as other mechanised entertainment.

Wrote Small: “Television Sir Laurence thinks of not so much as a competitor as a deadener of the faculties. On the screen, he says, ‘you can get a vague mothy kind of thing that covers the lot’, but sharp definitions, mental and visual, are blurred; too much viewing, too much listening can, as he has found, so dull the eyes, ears, and minds of audiences that without their mechanical aids they are first at a loss. ‘How can you expect to see properly if most of the time you go around with a pair of binoculars screwed into your eyes?’”

* Tomorrow: Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Glasgow

Read more: Herald Diary