A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (Comedy)
THEATRE
Good Egg
JOHN HIGGINS
Heartbreak House (Chichester) Let Sleeping Wives Lie (Garrick) As You Like It (Aldwych) The Dance of the Teletape (Royal Court) At the beginning of Peter Nichols's A Day in the Death of Joe Egg schoolmaster Brian is haranguing a recalcitrant class. 'Sit straight, eyes front, hands on heads!' So he leaves them, and goes home, wondering idly perhaps who made the first move and when. Once home be is confronted, as every evening, with his daughter Josephine, Joe Egg of the title, who will never sit up straight, stare ahead on com- mand or make her arms do anything but dangle uselessly at her side.
Joe is a ten-year-old spastic, a growing vegetable, whose disabilities have infected her father. Bri is one of the contemporary theatre's most tragic refugees, hiding his personal anguish in a shelter of gags and wisecracks. In his flight from the creature he has spawned he has ben, come the Entertainer of the Lower Fourth, the Archie Rice of the local comprehensive. The regulation schoolmaster's uniform, tweed jacket with leather patched elbows, is simply the cover of the amateur cracksman delivering a fusillade of jokes to keep reality at bay.
True to Bri, Peter Nichols has constructed his play as a tragedy with vaudeville numbers., The non-life of Joe Egg is recounted by Bri and his rather more stable wife, Sheila, in a series of music hall sketches, with monologues and songs delivered straight at the audience so. that the number of the act could almost go up in flickering lights on either side of Comedy Theatre's proscenium. Sheila's description of the five-day labour and the anguished birth is followed by a parade of charlatans in no posi- tion to help either Joe or her parents. In Bri's hands the GP who sees the human body only as a motor car engine, the Viennese neuro- logist piped in to a snatch of Fledermaus ('Vos a wegetable, jar), the swinging curate ('The c of E, that's where the action is') are wild, dis- torted caricatures. But beneath the grotesque, comic outlines lies a shrill cry of hate, the des- pair of a man who finds no one to help his daughter and is becoming more helpless him- self. This surface of jokes with its swirling undercurrent of venom is very close to the manner of the mid-'fifties Osborne.
After the charades, the development. In his second act-Peter Nichols allows in the outside
world. First Freddie and Pam, the conventional left wing capitalist bulging with noble senti- ments and his aloof wife flinching from any- thing that interrupts life's pretty round, and then Bri's Mum, Grace. In a remarkable per- formance, Joan Hickson suggests that this pea- brained woman with her genteel cups of tea at the local Gaumont and her mollycoddling of her only son set Bri on the. downhill path at an early age. If he hadn't sired a helpless daughter he would probably have turned into a loose- wristed queen running an antique shop in Brighton.
The second act is marginally less impressive than the first if only because too much has been revealed of Bri and his relationship to his wife and daughter. His move, when he makes it, is characteristically ineffectual. And I have my doubts about Peter Nichols's resolution of the play—I suspect he may have tried several alter- natives before opting for the one he did. But for seven eighths of its length Joe Egg is a masterly walk along the line that wiggles be- tween tragedy and comedy. Its laughter is up- lifting; its anguish brings other tears to the eyes.
Joe Melia has certainly never done anything better than Bri. The early revue training—and there is more than a touch of Jonathan Miller in the rapid character switches—makes those moves to the footlights only too easy, while the hooded eyes and gaunt features suggest the pain that lies below. An inspired piece of casting. Zena Walker has a less demonstrative part as Sheila, the wife who surrounds herself with pets and plants, depending on the flower power of aphelandras and busy Lizzies and the move- ments of cats and gawping goldfish to substitute for the immobile child. Phyllida Law and John Carson are the visiting couple, and the admir- able director of this admirable cast, Michael Blakemore.
I found myself standing outside John Clements's much praised production of Heart- break House at Chichester. Or rather sitting outside it on the edge of the middle block be- yond which too many of Shaw's golden lines fell short of straining ears. The centralists showed themselves fairly appreciative, but as sometimes before at this theatre it doesn't pay to be an outsider. The trouble is that in Heart- break there is not very much but golden lines any more. For all its vaunted Chekhovian spirit, Hesione, Hector, Boss Mangan and Lady Utter- word are cardboard figures compared with Masha, Vershinin, Lopakhin and Madame Ranevskaya. While the device of the burglar in Act 2 is almost as embarrassing as the dreaded monster at the beginning of Too True to be Good.
However, the talk is fine, too fine perhaps for these Edwardian relics who have strayed into the era of the First World War, as Shaw even- tually reveals. In a very uneven cast there are three performances of distinction—by Bill Fraser (Boss Mangan), Michael Aldridge (Hec- tor Hushabye, whose Arab costume for Act 2 looked Indian enough to go on the front of the Sgt. Pepper sleeve) and John Clements (Captain Shotover)—and one to stay in the memory. Irene Worth's Hesione is as handsome, clever, malicious and predatory as Shaw's lines and stage directions demand; sie makes the trip to Chichester worth while. John Clements's direction I found reverential to the point of tedium.
The new farce in the Brian Rix season at the Garrick, Let Sleeping Wives Lie by Harold #rooke and Kay Bannerman, is Hotel Paradiso. Brighton-style. Up stairs and down corridor
they run one summer Saturday night, so that paradiso becomes an inferno of substitute wives, husbands in frilly nighties and permissive chambermaids. It isn't as good as Uproar in the House, but dine first (and well) and it will make a deliciously raucous evening. Moreover, connoisseurs of farce will not wish to miss the performances of Andrew Sachs as a twittering manager and Leo Franklyn as one of those Methuselah hall porters only too familiar in British hotels.
In a week which has been immeasurably better than we have a right to expect in mid- summer—or mid-winter, mid-spring or mid- autumn for that matter—there is just space to welcome the Stratford As You Like. It to the Aldwych repertory with sharp and witty per- formances by Dorothy Tutin (Rosalind) and Janet Suzman (Celia) and note a preciously gifted twenty minute allegory, The Dance of the Teletape by Charles Hayward, a fourteen year old Dulwich schoolboy, at the Royal Court on Sunday.
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