"Throughout Eh Joe that face is examined by a camera in the wings. Dance's emotions can be seen in the flicker of a muscle, the slight movement of an eye. It's a supreme exercise in control. "I'm having to pull it back all the time. It's a fascinating thing to do. It's a very, very strange experience."
In Beckett's Eh Joe, Charles
Dance (substituting for Michael Gambon) in dressing gown in a small dim room,
closes the curtains over windows, cupboard and door and sits in profile to the
audience. His face appears, gigantic and slowly growing, on the scrim between
us, every detail of his face writ large as a female voice begins its litany of
accusations—in his head, or filtering through the floorboards, in the air
between us. Dance distributes the changes in his expression sparely, initially
with glowering intensity and then a weakening into vulnerability as the truth,
or whatever it is it, hits home and a tear falls at the end of the half hour
performance. If Krapp worries at his own earlier recorded and often forgotten
utterances, at least the voice is his own. Joe is like a man haunted and
rendered speechless, or is the voice his own ventriloquism, the only way he can
admit his doubts and crimes? Directed by Atom Egoyan, the screen device with
its double view of Dance, apart and face-to-face with us, worked strongly both
emotionally and as an easily accommodated theatre-cinema hybrid.
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/77/8328
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/77/8328
Eh Joe is a much more contemplative piece. Joe
(Charles Dance), his face projected on a translucent scrim stretched across the
entire stage, sits alone in a dingy room, tormented by a woman's voice. Unable
to defend himself, his agony plays out in tiny spasms of his face, culminating
in a solitary tear.
The
cinematic quality of the piece overwhelms its theatricality (Canadian filmmaker
Atom Egoyan directs) but it's undeniably gripping and Dance's command of his
facial tics is remarkable. It's the lesser of the three Beckett pieces in this
Sydney Festival but even then Eh
Joe offers more than most plays you're likely to see this year.
WHEN Michael Gambon was forced to
relinquish the lead role of Samuel Beckett's Eh Joe at the last minute
the show's producers must have been frantic.
That they managed to snare the services of English heavyweight
Charles Dance (Bleak House, Gosford Park, Nicholas Nickleby) with only a
matter of days to opening night is truly remarkable.
While the
lead role of Joe requires no words, the power of Eh Joe – originally
written for television in 1965 - hangs on the lead’s ability to express
his thoughts and emotions purely through his facial expressions.
This
production, by Dublin’s the Gate Theatre and directed by Atom Egoyan
(ATOM EGOYAN), remains truthful to the original TV script despite the
change in medium.
The set is starkly simple: a dingy, almost empty
room, its only furniture a single bed. As the lights go up, the room’s
sole occupant - Joe, a man in his late 50s/early 60s, dressed in old
pyjamas, a tatty dressing gown and worn slippers - is seated on the bed,
his back to the audience.
He tinkers around the room - then an unseen voice (voiceover by
Penelope Wilton ) urges Joe to ponder the wreckage that
is his life – and he does not enjoy the memory.
The television
conventions of the original play have been adapted well - a screen at
the front of the stage initially provides the set with a foggy, almost
misty aura.
Then a few minutes in, when Joe begins to battle his
tormenting voice, a close-up of his face is projected onto that same
screen and the actor’s every nuance is highlighted.
As mentioned
earlier, Dance is a fine replacement for Gambon as the world-weary and
tormented Joe. His patrician features are tailor-made to the role.
Though he says no words, he nevertheless speaks volumes.
Yet,
while Eh Joe is imbued with a quiet intensity, at little more than 25
minutes in total, it is not substantial enough to be touted as a
stand-alone production. But if coupled with one of Beckett’s meatier
plays it would have worked wonderfully as the first part of a Beckett
double bill.
Nevertheless, this is a wonderful opportunity -
albeit all too brief - to enjoy an actor of Charles Dance’s calibre in
the flesh.
Also, be warned, Eh Joe is certainly not for those in quest of "light" viewing.
