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The Brockley Jack Theatre and In Company Theatre present
A Day in the Death of Joe Egg
Written by Peter Nichols
Directed by Daniel Brennan
Designed by Katie Lias
Brockley Jack
24-28 November 2009
A review by Chad Armitstead for EXTRA! EXTRA!
It’s manic and mercurial, in the sense that the characters give the distinct impression that they may have swallowed mercury. That’s director Daniel Brennan’s accomplished and insane A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in a stroke. Joe Egg gives an intimate look at the life of Bri (Nick Kneller), Sheila (Trudi Boatwright) and their young brain-damaged daughter Joe (Karis Kohl and Georgia Taylor-Schindler), whose life consists of fits, bowel trouble and unintelligible moans. Sheila has built a menagerie of pets to fill up the cracks of her otherwise Joe-centric existence. School teacher Bri’s suspicion that he’s just an increasingly neglected member of the menagerie grows along with his jealousy and discontent. Writer Peter Nichols’ 1967 play has a long history of West End and Broadway revivals, with notable cast members including Albert Finney, Clive Owen, Eddie Izzard and Victoria Hamilton. In Company Theatre made their ethic as clear as a pin-prick to audiences in their last show, The Woman Before. Their often darkly comic pieces acknowledge their audiences and challenge their sensibilities and expectations of theatre. As their motto states, they’re “sharing the space.” And they never let the space get too comfy. This thunderhead of a play with its comic “jet black lining” doesn’t deviate from this formula. Brennan opens the show with deviously comic Bri directly addressing the audience as if they’re sixth-formers (or thereabouts). “Hands on head, eyes forward.” Using comic asides like this one, the script’s characters regularly acknowledge that they know they’re in a play and create some brilliantly awkward subtext. For those who would pound their fists, reject post-modern self-referential art and demand the fourth wall they were promised by the theatre, would have to admit that the intimate monologues are interesting and undeniably funny. Brennan’s cast delivers them with a playful urgency that has you wondering if you really ought to put your hands on your head to avoid being singled out. In fact, the show brims with a macabre playfulness. Kneller delivers Bri’s graveyard humour in quick, devastating slashes with devilish comic timing. Trudi Boatwright’s Sheila unsettles, answering Kneller blow for blow and playing the tragically child-obsessed matron with a disturbing coquettish oblivion. There’s a dynamic, endearing chemistry between the troubled couple—strangely made sweet by the way Kneller and Boatwright tell each other benevolent lies. This chemistry allows the passive-aggressive tension to build behind a beaming facade as the couple tells the story of their struggles with Joe (complete with impressions of doctors and an impressive rapid-fire succession of accents). Kneller and Boatwright begin the show with a mischievous intensity that immediately has the audience rapt. This out-of-the-gate comic energy perhaps leaves less emotional spectrum to exploit and some of Bri’s quiet, calculating side unexplored, but the effect can be mesmerising at times. Wendy Albiston (Pam) and Daniel Simpson (Freddie) mirror Bri and Sheila’s simmering conflict masked by dire comedy. Simpson’s blindly earnest socialist Freddie is good for more than a few laughs. Wendy Albiston gives a stern counterpoint performance as his wife. Her indignantly sensible Pam draws out the ridiculous in the industrialist. Sue Scantlebury plays matriarch to the thoroughly capable cast as Bri’s mother, with a performance that disguises Grace’s motherly meddling with feigned piety and disinterest. Karis Kohl rounded the cast off on the night I attended, impressively inert (a feat for a child) and tragically adorable as Joe. Designer Katie Lias renders Bri and Sheila’s 1960s flat with the precision, colour and attention to line of Mad Men. The lighting design’s dimming to punctuate asides goes a long way to clarifying the potentially confusing logic of the play’s structure. No lighting designer is credited, but one assumes the credit lies with Brennan and Lias. Brennan and cast achieve a sinister sort of magic in Joe Egg. Distracted by your own laughter, you never know they’ve put a knife through you until they twist it. They deliver an endlessly engaging evening, a smart and simmering show that’s funny until it’s deadly serious. And insane from start to finish.
£12, £9 concessions Box office: 0844 847 2454 www.brockleyjack.co.uk www.incompanytheatre.co.uk
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ary Couzens