Great Moments in the Theatre by Benedict Nightingale

Author:Benedict Nightingale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OBERON BOOKS Ltd

A DAY IN THE DEATH OF JOE EGG

CITIZENS THEATRE, GLASGOW, MAY 9 1967

When Peter Nichols’s first full-length play moved from Glasgow to London, Irving Wardle wrote in The Times that it was one of those occasions when audiences ‘can feel the earth moving under their feet’, adding that the thirty-nine-year-old dramatist had ‘significantly shifted our boundaries of taste’. Indeed it was. Joe Egg had taken a taboo subject – how to cope with a profoundly brain-damaged child and your own and others’ reactions to that child? – and hadn’t whined, pined, raged, got sentimental or melodramatic, struck social attitudes, promoted an agenda or descended into psychobabble. The play had done a radical thing, which was to tell the truth, and an original one, telling it in a style that treated its audiences as acquaintances who could laugh as well as learn.

The play came from personal experience. Peter and Thelma Nichols’s first child, Abigail, was born so disabled in 1960 that, in his words, ‘she didn’t really exist as a person at all’. But in the eleven years before she died her parents dealt with her helplessness and their pain largely through jokes and play-acting in which they imagined her doing or saying impossible things. That’s the strategy of Bri and Sheila in a play that Nichols would have preferred to call Funny Turns – which is what Abigail seemed at first to be having – but took its title from a children’s song: ‘Joe Egg is a fool, he tied his stockings to a stool. When the stool begins to crack, all the beetles run up his back.’

Nichols found the play’s creation cathartic: ‘I’ve experienced the cliché that by writing about experiences that trouble you, you can reduce them.’ Yet the first version was, he admitted, ‘savage, sentimental and overdone’ and its style naturalistic, with parents ‘bitter stereotypes’ and their child kept offstage, suggesting she was ‘a mad creature raving in the west wing’. The play was universally rejected before Michael Blakemore, a friend who was running Scotland’s leading rep, got Nichols radically to rewrite it and persuaded doubting employers and a worried Lord Chamberlain that it could be staged without financial or moral disaster.

What opened in Glasgow was, Nichols felt, ‘more Noël Coward than Strindberg’. It also owed much to his love of vaudeville and his decision to acknowledge the presence of a live audience. Bri and Sheila act out their memories of ineffective professionals and use direct address to share their thoughts, as do characters who include his insensitive mother and a guest who recommends euthanasia for ‘weirdos’. And in comes Jo or Joe in her wheelchair, twitching, moaning, fitting – but also, in a moment that dramatises Sheila’s wishfulness, skipping like any normal ten-year-old as she announces the interval.

‘If that moment’s performed right it’s pretty certain half the audience will be in tears when the lights come up,’ Nichols has said, and that was regularly the case in Glasgow. The Scottish critics were impressed, as was The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.