From Marg:

"I have just gone thru the experience of theatre as it should be presented.A wonderful thing to behold as you well know! Mr.Owen covered every emotion, a true craftsman. I will email more details later.I am sending a card today to the theatre on all of our behalf.I hope this meets with your approval. I also thought it might be a nice gesture to send flowers on Saturday as a send off.

The theatre was packed.There were people from all parts of the globe. Some were only conversant in their own language.The atmosphere was electric,diffused slightly by the fact that the revolving stage failed to revolve and had to be shifted manually! Much clapping and cheering followed that! Clive felt his way around the audience and the opening scene was a temperature gauge I'm sure. It set us back on our heels and we were won over from the onset. He was enjoying himself and was determined we would do the same - and we did! I will write more later but must sign off now."

A good egg. (A Day in the Death of Joe Egg) (Review) .New Statesman
KATHERINE DUNCAN JONES salutes the best production of the year

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 school-teacher in Bristol with a handicapped child, written, I suspect, by an oversexed schoolteacher in Bristol with a handicapped child".

Cuts were required, and the authorities made the staggeringly unperceptive suggestion that the play might be less offensive if the child were represented by a ventriloquist's dummy. This would have made nonsense of the scenes in which "Joe", the ten-year-old multiplegic Josephine, has to be seen to be a beautiful and "perfect" child even though, because of severe brain damage during her mother's five long days in labour, she cannot see, speak or, except when racked by convulsions, move. I believe that one of the first lessons taught in drama school used to be "playing dead", and that switching off all normal reflexes is extremely taxing. Both Catalina Blackman and Elizabeth Holmes-Gwillim rise to the challenge superbly in Laurence Boswell' s cracking new production. Some definite development is also required of the actress playing Joe. It is important that we witness the child's physical deterioration during the few hours of almost actual time that the play occupies, right down to the point where, as in the final scene of King Lear, audience and characters alike are racked by uncertainty as to whether the floppy girl they see carried on stage is alive or dead.

Like Lear, Joe Egg uses a mixture of melodrama, farce and even stand-up comedy to carry us down the deepest abysses of human suffering. But Peter Nichols's explicit echoes of Lear's request, first for a mirror, then for a feather, to test whether the comatose child breathes, does not depend in the least on Shakespearean allusion for its heart-rending effect. Nichols's play is genuinely original.

In its first major theatrical revival, Joe Egg comes across as both a fascinating period piece - can there really have been a time so recently when middle-class homes often lacked telephones? - and a play still, in some respects, artistically ahead of its time. Es Devlin' s design offers a 1960s interior that is also convincingly idiosyncratic, with Sheila's pets and pot plants and Bri' s Buffalo Bill oil paintings. Even the drinks that Bri offers guests have an amusingly "period" flavour - Spanish brandy from Torremolinos, or "cider, because I know you're a socialist". Apart from its subject matter, the play's most unusual strategy is to mingle direct addresses to the audience - in which each of Joe's parents in turn makes painfully urgent appeals for our complicity and forgiveness - with more conventionally dramatised scenes. Within the dramatised scenes, Bri's compulsive "acting" triggers continual uncertainty and uncomfortable - yet often very funny - shifts of register. This schoolteacher is not so much "oversexed" as overimaginative, compensating for the blank canvas that is his child with his own portrayals of a huge variety of alternative roles - the jealous husband, the dim-witted doctor, the "caring" clergyman, the sharp-shooting cowboy. The condition of "Joe Egg" - who does nothing, and to whom nothing happens - has to some extent fallen also on Joe's parents and, in the case of Bri, has generated a manic stir-craziness. This is a part for a virtuoso performer, and the smoulderingly handsome Clive Owen delivers what surely deserves to be an award-winning performance. He is nicely complemented by Victoria Hamilton as the sweet but guiltridden Sheila, who "loves all living things", the cat, the cat's fleas, the budgie, the house plants and, naturally, her "flower" of a daughter. Although less obviously histrionic than her husband, she, too, seeks solace in acting, both by projecting "normal" feelings and responses on to Joe and by going out in the evening to take part in amateur dramatics. The lack of any suggestion that, because her daughter is in daycare, Sheila could quite easily do paid work of some kind is another feature that now seems startling. It is a crucial component of the drama, for Sheila's determination to keep her daughter alive at all costs is shown to have an element of emotional dependence. Without Joe to look after, what would she do with her life?

Accidentally, perhaps, Nichols's play shows that we have come a long way in the past 34 years. Thank goodness for women's employment, cheap telephones, and for the much more ready resort to Caesarean surgery to deliver the foetus in distress.

After the assured clarity of the play's first half, the second seems more confused, and has a few touches of "White Christmas" corniness. Yet there is no decline in the standard of acting. John Warnaby as Freddie, for instance, gives a marvellously convincing rendition of the bossy liberal who can't bear to leave a social problem unsolved by himself. But Nichols's points become more laboured, and both Robin Weaver as Pam and Prunella Scales as Bri's smothering mother, Grace, have to work hard to rise above caricature. They succeed, however, and this must rank overall as one of the best stage productions of 2001.

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg is at the New Ambassadors Theatre, London WC2 (020 7369176), until 24 November

1993 Production -- A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, King's Head, Islington

IN THE programme notes, Peter Nichols writes apologetically about the blackish comedies that have followed where his Joe Egg led. The blind, deaf-mutes, sterility, mastectomy, cancer: "every handicap has its hilarious smash hit, each with its hard jokes and soft centre, sucking up to its public in the approved style of funny boo-hoo." Well, I have yet to see a laugh-riot about mastectomy; but, even if it exists, Nichols should not feel too responsible. Even an uncertain revival, such as this, shows that Joe Egg, far from being sentimental and ingratiating, is a play that makes you think while you feel and feel while you think, in each case about a subject of major concern.

If anything, it is of more concern than in 1967, when amniocentesis did not exist, abortion was mostly confined to the back streets, doctors found it harder indefinitely to prolong life, and euthanasia was, happily, not on the European agenda. What should be done for and with such as Jo, Brian and Sheila's profoundly damaged child? Were Nichols writing about her today, I suspect he would introduce more science into the dramatic equation. But his play still seems impressively complete, looking as it does at a "human vegetable" in terms of metaphysics, nappy-changing and plenty in between. Moreover, it does so without venturing out of Bri and Sheila's troubled living room. He wants Jo in a home, she won't hear of it. He has renounced all hope of improvement, she clings to the memory of the day, nine years ago, when Jo summoned up the intelligence to knock over a pile of coloured bricks. She regards him, rightly, as immature; he sees her, also rightly, as unrealistic. Either way, they mask their feelings by pretending that the figure sightlessly slumped in her wheelchair is the sort of wayward, demanding daughter everybody else seems to have. It gradually becomes clear that Jo is keeping them together yet driving them apart. Clive Owen, a nervous, driven Bri, and Elizabeth Garvie, an earnest, responsible Sheila, missed too much of the pain on opening night. Even when the games and the jokes stopped, and she started remembering those toy bricks, the emotional temperature stayed several degrees lower than the literal one on what was, admittedly, a hideously steamy evening. But they kept the play banging entertainingly along, whether they were spoofing inept doctor or glacial consultants for the benefit of the audience, or coping with visitors who ran the gamut of insensitivity. Here is the play's weakness. Most friends would be less unsubtle than Freddie, the smug do-gooder who wants Jo institutionalised, or his wife Pam, the genteel Hitlerite who would happily see her killed for research purposes. And if each of them too obviously represents an attitude Nichols thinks we should hear, Bri's mum has no reason for venturing into the living room except to bait the self-doubting Sheila by combatively infantilising her husband.

Yet despite that, despite the inadequacies of Lisa Forrell's cast, Joe Egg is clearly a modern classic, and would merit a major revival. If you doubt its pull, watch Katey Kastin's frail Jo embodying her mother's fantasies by suddenly skipping and singing across the stage, like any ten-year-old Jane or Jill. Is there a more touching moment in contemporary drama? I don't know it.

Reviews above thanks to Erica