Failed comic Archie Rice was one of Oliver's finest roles. Yet it nearly didn't happen. As The Entertainer is revived, John Heilpern tells a story of snobbery, Suez and censorshipJohn Osborne's formative influence in theatre - the "overture to danger" that energised all his work - was his childhood experience of that great, now vanished, people's art of England, music hall. His beloved, tubercular dad first took him …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:54AM on August 31, 2016