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Eh Joe

Duke of York's Theatre, West End
From: Tuesday, 27th June 2006
To: Saturday, 15 July 2006

Our Review: Your Reviews:

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Synopsis

Eh Joe was written by Beckett for television and aired on the BBC in 1966. Joe sits in his room sealed off from the world. A voice lures him to examine the shards of his rough life. As he wordlessly contemplates the voice's accusations, the entire wave of human emotion is captured on camera. The astonishing visual image and the voice's spoken word entwine together in a mesmerising farewell to life.

Our Review:

2 July 2006

Like most people, I would pay good money to see Michael Gambon doing nothing at all, but I do think a trick has been missed in this lugubrious, reverential staging of Samuel Beckett�s 1965 television play Eh Joe, which the author wrote for the great Irish actor Jack McGowran. It�s barely 25 minutes long. Gambon does more or less nothing. The mixing of media language � stage and film � is desperately disappointing from that fascinating Armenian film director, Atom Egoyan.

The play is supposed to be punctuated by nine moves of the camera, but Egoyam gives us nothing beyond the static image of Gambon sitting on a bed watching, disinterestedly, his own blown-up image of flickering eyelids and jowly boredom. A disembodied voice comes in with various accusatory remarks and sexual challenges.

To these, the great Gambon lets his big unmade bed of face sag with sadness. But is this enough to justify the price of a ticket? Why couldn�t the management, wor...

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