A DAY IN THE DEATH OF JOE EGG. To 29 April.
Manchester
A DAY IN THE DEATH OF JOE EGG
by Peter Nichols
Library Theatre To 29 April 2006
Mon-Thu 7.30pm Fri-Sat 8pm Mat 15, 19, 22, 26, 29 April 3pm
Audio-described 26, 29 April 3pm
BSL Signed 19 April 3pm
Captioned 25 April
Pre-show talk 13 April 6.30pm, 22 April 2pm
Runs 2hr 45min One interval
TICKETS: 0161 236 7110
www.librarytheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 April
Central performance turns an ordinary, competent production into one of extraordinary incompetence.
History plays strange tricks with this revival of Peter Nchols’ comedy from 1967, a date now viewed as the summer of love, hippiedom’s height. Yet we are in a suburban living-room, its decor suggesting post post-war lightness, while the people we meet, teacher Bri, his wife Sheila and her friends, married couple Freddie and Pam, are generally as conventional a set as might be found. Freddie with his businessman’s feelgood philanthropy, Pam with her coy initials (anyone NPA, Not Physically Attractive, is her pet hate) are, like Sheila’s mum who unconvincingly drops by late at night, caricatures.
High on Pam’s avoid-like-the-plague list is Sheila and Bri’s daughter Josephine (‘Joe Egg’ is a tag Sheila adopts from a saying of her mother) with her complex mental disabilities. A drooling, fit-seized, wheelchair-dependent 11-year old (or thereabouts; this was the age at which Nichols’ own disabled daughter died), Josephine with her inarticulate cries is ironically the most deeply-felt character in the play.
Far from any summer of love, the play moves to a cold winter night, dark as Bri’s ‘final solution’ to Joe’s suffering. Yet the play’s sixties refusal to be sentimental and Bri’s anguished acerbity to everyone and every institution, distances the action. Hard to imagine Joe would be neglectfully treated at her day centre in 2006; impossible to think a teacher and his wife, as parents, would do nothing about it.
Bri’s work as a teacher is reflected in his insistent act-one talk to the audience, who begin treated like a noisy class. His story-to-date hijacks the first half, as the play knowingly admits. Nichols’s technique of played-out scenes amid narration has become common enough (Michael Frayn says he picked the technique up from Nichols) and his comic acerbity has largely won the day.
Roger Haines’ otherwise competent if unexciting production gives Jason Thorpe room to take Bri’s anger into an anarchy of impersonations that are very funny but let the play fall apart amid an orgy of mugging and onstage giggling. This isn’t the revival the play deserves, though it’s one which indicates the problems such a revival might face.
Bri: Jason Thorpe
Sheila: Judy Flynn
Joe: Lucy Smith/Beth Critchley
Freddie: Christopher Brand
Pam: Race Davies
Grace: Tina Gray
Director: Roger Haines
Designer: Judith Croft
Lighting: James Farncombe
Sound: Paul Gregory
2006-04-09 13:00:28