This play, like John Osborne's breakaway hit "Look Back In Anger", features a central character who, for a variety of reasons, believes he got a raw deal out of life. Archie Rice is the eponymous main character: a showman in his fifties who refuses to adapt to the changing times, who drinks and womanizes almost incessantly, and whose bad decisions sabotage his family's finances and their happiness.
Much of Archie's bad luck is due to the very predictable consequences of his own decisions, including his decision to create an apathetic shell around himself. As a way to deal with his own hopeless situation and his helplessness and inability to provide for his family or do his share to promote the interests of honest society, he cultivates a flippant and irreverent attitude that contains a great deal of apathy and cynicism. In order to advance this image of himself he conducts himself with cruelty and dishonesty toward nearly everyone. But this irresponsible, dishonest, and abusive behavior alienates the people around him and cause them to withdraw their support, which contributes to his increasing isolation and sense of hopelessness.
Archie is helpless in the face of social and cultural change, particularly the rise of television and film media and the resulting obsolescence of stage and variety shows. His audiences grow smaller and smaller over the course of the play, and although he proves himself an able showman and improviser in the second scene, by the end of the play he is completely broken and unable to even maintain his normal flippant facade, much less to entertain anyone with it. Yet his identification of himself as an entertainer is so strong that, instead of admitting defeat and moving to Canada to start a new wife with his wife and surviving son, he dabbles with not just bankruptcy but outright fraud in order to continue to fund his production.
Archie's helplessness extends to his own children. He is unable to protect his son Mick, who is captured and killed while serving in the British military during the Suez Canal crisis. Like the variety show, England itself has experienced a decline. Whereas Britain once ruled the waves and commanded an empire on which the Sun never set, now her influence is limited to a voluntary Commonwealth of independent former colonies and has lost much of her former military dominance and prestige.
Archie tends to be a man who takes the path of least resistance while appearing to strive. Mick gives his life in the service of his country and is accorded a hero's burial, having done his duty much like the retired showman Billy Rice (Archie's Father) did in World War I, when he survived the Dardanelles without a scratch. This contrasts strikingly with Archie's behavior. Archie served briefly during World War II, having been sent to Canada where he saw the most moving musical performance of his life. But instead of serving out his enlistment, he deliberately engineered his own discharge from the military by pretending to be homosexual.
Much of the bitterness and cruelty in the play comes from the way Archie and some of his children believe that they will never be able to really live or to experience excellence or importance the way Billy did in his day, because the system is stacked against them. Jean, Archie's daughter by the woman he married prior to Phoebe, struggles against it by attending a rally in Trafalgar Square and by rejecting her upwardly-mobile suitor Graham because she believes he will try to keep her from doing what she wants and from becoming someone important. She is unsure exactly what she wants to do to become significant or how she proposes to do it, yet the fact that Graham is well on his way to achieving his ambitions causes the same kind of resentment Archie has toward his more successful brother Bill.
Frank, Archie's surviving son, takes a more pragmatic approach. Although he may never achieve personal greatness, he doesn't let the system push him around: he served six months in prison for refusing to serve in the military, whereas Mick simply went when he was called. He tells Jean to start looking out for "number one", meaning herself, because nobody else will. Indeed, when Brother Bill provides tickets for Archie, Phoebe, and Frank to move to Canada to avoid the legal consequences of Archie's bankrupt spending, nobody asks Jean whether she wants to come, or offers her a ticket.
Unlike the distinguished Billy who frequently shares stories of his earlier successes (but who has been financially reduced to living on a pension due perhaps to his ongoing support of Archie and his family), Archie shares only the most tawdry stories from his past, and they may or may not be true. He brags about his drinking, his romantic excesses, his slick dishonesty in evading his military duty and his taxes, and the way nuns react negatively to him. But one episode stands apart: an incident when Archie witnessed a musical performance by a woman of African descent that was so powerful and emotional, he wished that he and she could trade places so that he could experience what it was like to deliver such a stunning, perfect emotional release. He wished that he could feel deeply enough to experience the kind of emotion that drove the woman's performance. He gets that part of his wish, at least, when he receives notification of Mick's death.
