Video: Played in Britain, The Missing Plays - 5. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg

Michael Billington: Well yes, Peter Nichols is a major writer and in 1967 he wrote a play called A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, a comedy but it's a comedy about disability and what it's like for a married couple to grow up with a severely handicapped child. Now this play was written out of personal experience; Peter and Thelma Nichols had had exactly that. And what the play says is you can't treat this minute by minute, hour by hour, as a terrible tragedy; you have to find a way of living with it, of coping with it and the way is to make comedy out of it. I think that was an important play because it sort of shifted people's attitudes to this very subject. It made us aware yes, of the awful problems of bringing up a disabled child but it also showed us how people cope with it. Brilliant play.