 Osborne was already at work on a new play , The Entertainer , an allegory of Britain 's post @-@ colonial decline , centred on a <unk> variety comedian , Archie Rice . Having read the first act — all that was completed by then — Olivier asked to be cast in the part . He had for years maintained that he might easily have been a third @-@ rate comedian called " Larry Oliver " , and would sometimes play the character at parties . Behind Archie 's brazen façade there is a deep <unk> , and Olivier caught both aspects , switching , in the words of the biographer Anthony Holden , " from a <unk> <unk> comic routine to moments of the most <unk> pathos " . Tony Richardson 's production for the English Stage Company transferred from the Royal Court to the Palace Theatre in September 1957 ; after that it toured and returned to the Palace . The role of Archie 's daughter Jean was taken by three actresses during the various runs . The second of them was Joan Plowright , with whom Olivier began a relationship that endured for the rest of his life . Olivier said that playing Archie " made me feel like a modern actor again " . In finding an avant @-@ garde play that suited him , he was , as Osborne remarked , far ahead of Gielgud and Ralph Richardson , who did not successfully follow his lead for more than a decade . Their first substantial successes in works by any of Osborne 's generation were Alan Bennett 's Forty Years On ( Gielgud in 1968 ) and David <unk> 's Home ( Richardson and Gielgud in 1970 ) . 
