Bittersweet portrait of parental PAIN
Peter NICHOLS wasn’t a household name like his contemporary Harold Pinter, but his plays were much more fun.
Following his death last month aged 92, there couldn’t be a more fitting tribute to the author, whose works included Passion Play and Privates On Parade, than this revival of Joe egg: a play from 1967 about a Bristol couple struggling to cope with their severely disabled daughter.
Starring toby Stephens and Claire Skinner, with Patricia Hodge as an interfering mother-in-law, it’s a semi-autobiographical story inspired by Nichols and his wife’s struggles with their own child.
But the joy of the play is that it’s not agonising or constipated. It heaves with theatricality, and bursts with desperate humour. Crucially, it reduces the audience to rapt silence on a very sensitive subject.
Attitudes to disability have changed enormously, but what I found remarkable is how the honesty of Nichols’ account leaves all that standing. Words like cripple, vegetable and spastic are strongly taboo, but the playwright challenges their usage. More important, the characters are real people, unedited by political correctness — in particular, Stephens’s Brian, a beleaguered teacher who deals with the stress of his highly dependent daughter with schoolboy humour.
Larking about, doing silly Goonish voices, is his survival strategy. It’s a barnstorming performance that makes Stephens’s not always sympathetic character lovable. And the pain of failure, as a parent and husband, is scored on his face.
THE same goes for Skinner’s Sheila, who refuses to give up on him, or her daughter. Improbably, for modern audiences, she fears the child is her comeuppance for her former promiscuity.
But these were different times; and Skinner’s steely performance makes Sheila as close to a saint as this very earthbound play will allow.
As the meddling mother-inlaw, Patricia Hodge is no less adept at emotional displacement. rather than speak her feelings, she fusses about the place and gossips. She may seem like a comic cliché of the period, but Hodge ensures her wittering about department stores is a thoroughly human foible; a means of suppressing her own fears.
there are equally sharp cameos from Clarence Smith, as wealthy do-gooder Freddie; and Lucy eaton, as his breezily self- centred wife, who scoffs that a man in tears gives her the creeps. It’s as though everyone is trapped inside a social straitjacket in Simon evans’s nuanced production, that absolves the characters as much as they condemn themselves.
the characters also put themselves forward to be judged by the audience, stepping off the stage to explain their fears. the challenge is to love and forgive them as much as Nichols does.
Finally, centre stage, it’s the pathos and dignity of Storme toolis as the silent disabled child, that forms the inscrutable emotional core, and guarantees that A Day In the Death Of Joe egg is still a poignant play that cheers as much as it chastens.
Things have been quiet on the John Simm front. the last meaty part the Life On Mars star got his gnashers into was the Master in Dr Who nearly ten years ago.
Now, he’s back as Macbeth in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Simm is perhaps a surprising choice for the warlord who slaughters his way to the Scottish throne. He is a comparatively cerebral actor and, though thoughtful, he didn’t blow my socks off. He’s anxious, expressive, even edgy. But he’s also measured, introverted and a teeny bit reserved.
there are moments when we get the full swivel- eyed possession. After the ghost of Banquo comes to haunt his team-building dinner party we get a fabulous explosion of panic-stricken delusion.
But I wanted more of the disgust and low regard in which he comes to hold the world — and himself.
Dervla Kirwan does supply high- quality rocket fuel as Lady Macbeth. She’s attentive, calculating and ruthless. But she’s good value, too, when she has her own breakdown; scrubbing invisible blood from her guilty hands.
Otherwise the action creeps, in a petty pace, from scene to scene in Paul Miller’s slick production — and it’s not a play that performs well in lower gears. It needs to eat the road, or else it stalls.