Beckett’s Joe Precedes Stoppard at Duke of York’sDate: 25 May 2006
Though the Beckett Centenary Festival finished at the Barbican on 6 May (See News, 17 Feb 2006), London hasn’t yet seen the last of it. A new stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s TV play Eh Joe - which was presented last month at the Barbican’s Festival partner, the Gate Theatre in Dublin – will now have a limited run at the West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre. It opens on 29 June 2006 (previews from 27 June) and continues, with two performances nightly, until 15 July 2006.
Eh Joe has been adapted for the stage by screen director Atom Egoyan, who directed the TV version of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape with John Hurt in 2000. Beckett wrote the 30-minute piece for actor Jack MacGowran who first performed it on the BBC in 1966. In it, a disembodied voice addresses a monologue to an actor otherwise alone in a room. The voice reminds Joe of a past love affair that ended tragically because Joe drove the woman to suicide.
On television, a single camera moved from a long shot to a close-up of Joe's face. In the theatre, Egoyan positions a camera in the wings, letting it slowly move onto the actor’s face, which is projected onto a screen on the stage.
Though casting has not been confirmed for the West End, in Dublin last month Michael Gambon played Joe, with Penelope Wilton providing the narrative: Gambon does not speak, Wilton is never seen. The two actors last collaborated in the West End on another Gate Theatre-led project, a rehearsed reading of Harold Pinter’s Celebration, which ran for three nights only in December to mark Pinter’s 75th birthday (See News, 18 Nov 2005).
For Gambon’s last full-fledged West End production, he starred with Lee Evans in Matthew Warchus’ 2004 revival of Beckett’s Endgame at the Duke of York’s. Last year, he played Falstaff in Henry IV at the National.
Currently at the Duke of York’s, Embers, the new Christopher Hampton play starring Jeremy Irons, is due to finish its extended season on 24 June 2006. Eh Joe will be succeeded by Trevor Nunn’s world premiere production of Tom Stoppard’s Rock 'n' Roll, starring Rufus Sewell, Brian Cox and Sinead Cusack. The latter moves to the West End playhouse from 22 July 2006 after its initial dates in Sloane Square as part of the Royal Court’s 50th anniversary season (See News, 18 Apr 2006).
- by Terri Paddock
NOTE: Booking has not yet opened for Eh Joe.
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