Joe Egg

A startling comedy of anguish has opened on Broadway. Peter Nichols' Joe Egg turns blistering pain into bubbling laughter as it focuses on the vastly uncomic plight of two parents whose ten-year-old child is a spastic vegetable. While this might appear to be the epitome of black and sick comedy, the play is neither, though it is full of the modern humor of cruelty and the games people play to put each other on or down.

Little Josephine (Joe) Egg sags in a wheelchair, wets herself, whimpers a little, rarely opens her eyes, and has periodic fits. There are no jokes made about any of that. But the child's absence is her presence; an inert object, she is the playwright's catalytic agent for fusing, exploring and exploding the relationships and attitudes of the people around her. That is where the chemistry of laughter begins.

The father, Bri (Albert Finney), has cauterized his pain by becoming a perpetual jester. He uses the child as a kind of ventriloquist's dummy through which to josh, mimic and needle his wife and the world. In a performance of sustained pyrotechnics, Finney does petrifyingly funny parodies of a Viennese neurologist who first assessed Joe's brain damage and of a pipe-sucking Anglican clergyman who is quite unstrung to hear God described as "a manic-depressive rugby footballer." To Joe Egg's mother, Sheila (Zena Walker), the child has become another pet to coddle along with cats, birds and Bri himself, who has never quite grown up.

In a number of ways, Bri and Sheila are British cousins of Virginia Woolf's George and Martha. Like George, Bri is a teacher; like Martha, Sheila has been promiscuous and may still be. Along with an abrasively ironic war of words, both couples play games of cut-throat tomfoolery. At play's end, Bri tries to kill Joe--a child who is almost as mythical as the imaginary son in Woolf--and when that fails, he leaves his wife. An original in its own right, Joe Egg owes no dramatic debt to Albee's masterly play--yet both works breathe the same choking psychic air and alike are planted in the same mordant, macabre soil of human comedy

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