Britain's misbegotten role in the invasion of Iraq, and the rising tally of our soldiers killed over there, lend an arresting topicality to John Osborne's 50-year-old, rotten-state-of-the-nation drama. I was caught in a haze of nostalgia, amusement and high emotion.

The Entertainer, in which the vituperative playwright brilliantly likened the United Kingdom to the clapped-out, decaying world of music hall, has dated and matured as well as vintage cheese.

In his pale blue suit, with a darker shade of blue jokes in his armoury, Robert Lindsay makes that third-rate song, tap-dance and smutty-patter man, Archie Rice, an irresistible comic turn.

Timing immaculate, this camp vulgarian with a cane, metaphorically touches up the audience to the manner brought up.

There he stands, a touch of Frankie Howerd and Donald Sinden in his voice, a caddish Terry Thomas look to his leering mouth.

With his tatty showmanship on the halls, Lindsay almost manages to paper over The Entertainer's structural flaws, its redundant third act and sentimentalities which peak when Archie reacts to news of his son's death by singing the blues. Lindsay falls short, though, when it comes to Archie's underlying sense of anger and despair.

Osborne lists his scenes as if they were music hall acts. And Sean Holmes's over-statuesque production, with designer Anthony Lamble's huge green proscenium curtains and a blown-up photo of a seaside resort, makes it seem as if The Entertainer moves between a music hall stage and the scene of a Fifties drama.

The precise date is November 1956, when Anthony Eden's Conservative government had launched its attack upon Suez, an imperial act of aggression analogous to Blair's on Iraq and potentially even more dangerous.

Stage censorship, still wielded with the Lord Chamberlain's fierce blue pencil in the Fifties, meant that Osborne could barely debate politics in The Entertainer, yet that canal still inundates the play to direct, deadly, dramatic effect.

For it is the capture and subsequent murder of Archie's soldier son that gives the play its waiting-game tension and strengthens Osborne's critique of Britain's reluctance to accept that its days of imperial glory were over.

The grief and bemusement that afflicts the Rice family will speak directly to those today whose relations and friends died serving in Iraq.

Beyond these hard facts of life and death, Osborne sets Archie Rice's failing music hall career in parallel with family life in lodgings.
Here, an atmosphere of bickering resentment and ennui prevail.

Archie's father, Billy, played to comic, plaintive perfection by John Normington, is presented as a far superior sort of music hall artist.

He keeps both his genteel feet firmly planted in his adored Edwardian past and keeps drawing attention to where he stands. He rails against foreigners and lost standards of young women and civilisation.

This middle-class gentleman embodies Osborne's sentimental, Tory vision of Edward VII's England, when empire building was still a popular trade.

Pam Ferris in vehement emotional form as Archie's lower-class wife, Jean, whom he intends to trade in for a much younger model, chatters nervously to her listless step-daughter.

A grand, stinging pathos is achieved with the family's communal music hall turn, when Ferris sings for the boy she loves in the gallery, before catastrophe strikes.

The Entertainer paints an enthralling picture, both grim and comically captivating, of Britain in the grip of escapist fantasy.