The face is lined, the eyes are appalled and the mouth long ago forgot how to smile. This is David Schofield playing Archie Rice in Greg Hersov’s revival of John Osborne’s 1957 play. Archie is a talentless music-hall performer whose antics on stage are bad enough but whose behaviour at home is abysmal. How has he become like this? Osborne doesn’t say, though he discourses a great deal on other matters, notably the decline of music hall, the decline of morals and the decline of Britain.

Though Archie is odious, and unlikely ever to have resembled anyone in the real world, he is eventually allowed by his author to touch on his pain, and it must be for these speeches that he is so absorbing a character to play. The carapace of sneers and frenzied joking cracks and Schofield shows us a bitter memory of exultation and a brief hushed wail of grief.

That said, however, the character is a bewildering enigma, and it is hard to think that he seemed otherwise 50 years ago. What must have been astonishing was Osborne’s inspired device of interweaving scenes at Archie’s dreary home with songs from his fifth-rate show.

Yet the snarling tone of these songs and their ambivalent regard of Britishness are a further puzzle.

Never knowing where we are with an author can be exciting but in this play the only time Osborne seems convinced about what he’s on about is his rage that young soldiers are dying in a pointless war. He apparently regrets the passing of the music halls, and Archie’s father Billy is said to have been one of the greats. David Ryall gives him a forlorn dignity, xenophobic but also poignant.

Yet we have to take his former greatness on trust. We have to take everyone’s better qualities on trust.

Osborne also appears angry at the approach of the “never had it so good” society, while presenting the society it is replacing as just as nasty. Only the fate of Archie’s soldier son Mick, captured during the Suez war, is shown as unequivocally vile — and makes this revival all too timely.

Laura Rees gives a tight and truthful performance as Archie’s daughter Jean. I mean “tight” as praise because we see her for the most part nursing a secret confusion, uncertain how, or even whether, to distance herself from her intolerant family. And as Archie’s wife Phoebe, seldom sober, Roberta Taylor gives a cleverly observed study of maudlin anger.

Hersov’s direction brings the furniture on to the stage on a trolley and trundles it away in the end. We seem to be witnessing the closing of some British tradition. Not one I can regret passing.

Box office: 0161-833 9833, to Dec 5

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