The Entertainer, The Old Vic, London

With memories of a summer in the dark and the execrable Resurrection Blues still painfully fresh, artistic director Kevin Spacey is playing it safe this season at the Old Vic, following up O'Neill and Shakespeare with the angry young man of British theatre, John Osborne. And this latest production comes with the added confidence boost of a critically acclaimed rehearsed reading under its belt. The Entertainer kicked off the Royal Court's 50th anniversary series of readings in January last year with Robert Lindsay as Archie Rice and Pam Ferris as his beleaguered wife.

Now, in time for another half-centenary - this time of the play - the pair have reprised their roles in a new production by Sean Holmes. The bare boards and ascetic, hard-backed chairs of the rehearsal studio have been replaced by an archetypally drab 1950s living room, framed, in a nod to the play's theatricality, by extravagantly swagged curtains.

The Entertainer, and in particular the role of Archie, arrives at the Old Vic with its fair share of baggage. It was the play with which John Osborne followed up his era-defining Look Back in Anger in 1957, and which provided Laurence Olivier with perhaps his most memorable role in modern dress. A searing state-of-the-nation drama with the Suez crisis as its backdrop, it paints a grim portrait of decay, setting the disintegration of the washed-up performer Archie and his family against the dying days of the music-hall tradition and the wider decline of British imperial power.

Sidling on to the stage, jaunty bowler hat wobbling and cane spinning, Lindsay doesn't show too many signs of the burden of history. As Archie, he clings on to the disinterested audience's attention for a few precious minutes before the main attraction of the nude tableaux.

Eyes glinting with desperation, he is a twitchy, uncomfortable presence, constantly interrupting himself with irritating stage patter and vaudeville gestures. But on odd occasions his voice cracks to reveal a man "dead behind the eyes" and teetering beneath the false jollity and smutty innuendo.

Too self-absorbed to save his family from implosion, he is branded by his daughter Jean as a "bastard on wheels", for his unremittingly cruel treatment of his wife Phoebe, whom he plans to leave for a younger model.

Ferris is magnificent as his abused spouse. A mother ruined by gin, she swerves from chattering housewife to belligerent drunk, ever poised on the verge of weepy hysterics. She puffs out her chest, stabs the air with her finger, sways on tiptoes and steals most of the scenes she is in.

Among the supporting cast David Dawson is nicely wound-up as Frank, a damaged child of the 50s, and John Normington has good lines as Archie's cantankerous old father. Emma Cunniffe's Jean - admittedly a difficult role as the member of the "making something of her life" - is rather ungainly as the angry young woman, though her interpretation brings home the shocking modernity of Osborne's character.

Indeed, the contemporary resonances are hard to miss with the play's depiction of the destruction wrought on one family by war - one son killed in action, another jailed for being a conscientious objector and a daughter who loses her fiancé for going on a protest march.

A society on the brink of change, disillusioned by war and represented by a fading entertainer. It's a nice irony Lindsay's last role was as the Prime Minister in The Trial of Tony Blair.