Theatre - Katherine Duncan-Jones salutes the best production of the year

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg was well ahead of its time in 1967, when it received the compliment of the Lord Chamberlain's disapproval. Someone in his office reported on it snootily as "a play about an oversexed schoolteacher in Bristol with a handicapped child, written, I suspect, by an oversexed schoolteacher in Bristol with a handicapped child".

Cuts were required, and the authorities made the staggeringly unperceptive suggestion that the play might be less offensive if the child were represented by a ventriloquist's dummy. This would have made nonsense of the scenes in which "Joe", the ten-year-old multiplegic Josephine, has to be seen to be a beautiful and "perfect" child even though, because of severe brain damage during her mother's five long days in labour, she cannot see, speak or, except when racked by convulsions, move. I believe that one of the first lessons taught in drama school used to be "playing dead", and that switching off all normal reflexes is extremely taxing. Both Catalina Blackman and Elizabeth Holmes-Gwillim rise to the challenge superbly in Laurence Boswell's cracking new production. Some definite development is also required of the actress playing Joe. It is important that we witness the child's physical deterioration during the few hours of almost actual time that the play occupies, right down to the point where, as in the final scene of King Lear, audience and characters alike are racked by uncertainty as to whether the floppy girl they see carried on stage is alive or dead.

Like Lear, Joe Egg uses a mixture of melodrama, farce and even stand-up comedy to carry us down the deepest abysses of human suffering. But Peter Nichols's explicit echoes of Lear's request, first for a mirror, then for a feather, to test whether the comatose child breathes, does not depend in the least on Shakespearean allusion for its heart-rending effect. Nichols's play is genuinely original.

In its first major theatrical revival, Joe Egg comes across as both a fascinating period piece - can there really have been a time so recently when middle-class homes often lacked telephones? - and a play still, in some respects, artistically ahead of its time. Es Devlin's design offers a 1960s interior that is also convincingly idiosyncratic, with Sheila's pets and pot plants and Bri's Buffalo Bill oil paintings. Even the drinks that Bri offers guests have an amusingly "period" flavour - Spanish brandy from Torremolinos, or "cider, because I know you're a socialist". Apart from its subject matter, the play's most unusual strategy is to mingle direct addresses to the audience - in which each of Joe's parents in turn makes painfully urgent appeals for our complicity and forgiveness - with more conventionally dramatised scenes. Within the dramatised scenes, Bri's compulsive "acting" triggers continual uncertainty and uncomfortable - yet often very funny - shifts of register. This schoolteacher is not so much "oversexed" as overimaginative, compensating for the blank canvas that is his child with his own portrayals of a huge variety of alternative roles - the jealous husband, the dim-witted doctor, the "caring" clergyman, the sharp-shooting cowboy. The condition of "Joe Egg" - who does nothing, and to whom nothing happens - has to some extent fallen also on Joe's parents and, in the case of Bri, has generated a manic stir-craziness. This is a part for a virtuoso performer, and the smoulderingly handsome Clive Owen delivers what surely deserves to be an award-winning performance. He is nicely complemented by Victoria Hamilton as the sweet but guilt- ridden Sheila, who "loves all living things", the cat, the cat's fleas, the budgie, the house plants and, naturally, her "flower" of a daughter. Although less obviously histrionic than her husband, she, too, seeks solace in acting, both by projecting "normal" feelings and responses on to Joe and by going out in the evening to take part in amateur dramatics. The lack of any suggestion that, because her daughter is in daycare, Sheila could quite easily do paid work of some kind is another feature that now seems startling. It is a crucial component of the drama, for Sheila's determination to keep her daughter alive at all costs is shown to have an element of emotional dependence. Without Joe to look after, what would she do with her life?

Accidentally, perhaps, Nichols's play shows that we have come a long way in the past 34 years. Thank goodness for women's employment, cheap telephones, and for the much more ready resort to Caesarean surgery to deliver the foetus in distress.

After the assured clarity of the play's first half, the second seems more confused, and has a few touches of "White Christmas" corniness. Yet there is no decline in the standard of acting. John Warnaby as Freddie, for instance, gives a marvellously convincing rendition of the bossy liberal who can't bear to leave a social problem unsolved by himself. But Nichols's points become more laboured, and both Robin Weaver as Pam and Prunella Scales as Bri's smothering mother, Grace, have to work hard to rise above caricature. They succeed, however, and this must rank overall as one of the best stage productions of 2001.

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg is at the New Ambassadors Theatre, London WC2 (020 7369 1761), until 24 November

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