Review: A Day in the Death of Joe Egg

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg by Peter Nichols
Darlinghurst Theatre Company & Whoosh Productions
Friday March 2 2007


It's 1967. Rag pile carpets, velvet trousers and Maxies. Casino Royale is the 007 of the time and the United States is becoming embroiled in a theatre of war known as Vietnam.

The Cold War is at its heights, Israel occupies the Gaza Strip, China tests its first hydrogen bomb, Che Guevera is executed and Keith Richards is charged with the possession of drugs. How things change!

And forty years after its premiere in London's West End, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg has a revival in a little corner of Sydney's red light district.

Sitting with my companion as the audience shuffles in holding their white wine and lolly flavoured spritzers, I take in the sets realism. There's the rag pile, a retro glass cabinet and pot plants. I feel like I'm a lounge lizard wandering through a second hand furniture shop in Newtown.

Katherine Duncan-Jones in New Statesman explained that A Day in the Death of Joe Egg "was well ahead of its time in 1967, when it received the compliment of the Lord Chamberlain's disapproval. Someone in his office reported on it snootily as 'a play about an oversexed schoolteacher in Bristol with a handicapped child, written, I suspect, by an oversexed schoolteacher in Bristol with a handicapped child'."

Thankfully, forty years on, the Lord Chamberlain's office is outdated, but Joe Egg still resonates as a text that quietly discomforts you towards its maddening end. It is most well known for its monologues printed in every 'I'm an actor and I need help' guide.

As a play, the structure of it is still disarmingly fresh and relevant. It's not so much the dilemma of how the couple deal with a disabled child within a naive society that strikes, but rather the feeling of being like Atlas, trying to stop the sky falling in as your humanity spurts itself out.

It's a humanity that admits failure.

Whoosh's production at the Darlinghurst captures 1967 as though you were seated in the back of an Austin Mini. It's a beautiful and good looking car in very good condition. But there isn't enough head room where I am seated. The windows are a little small and my knees are up to my chin.

It as though they try to honour too much of 1967 and then miss the opportunity to see how the text could play out with a more contemporary appreciation. You can smell flashes of 2007 and it is when they discover this that the production really lives. Whoosh's artistic policy is to, amongst other things, present 'contemporary interpretations of classics'. If they had used that as a basis of this production they might have found even more engaging moments in a play that really does travel the distance.


Image: Jonathan Gavin & Julia Davis
PHOTO BY: Cameron Baird for Sensory Creative