It is a bold piece of programming and some of Wilder’s scenes are wonderfully crazy with a mammoth and dinosaur wandering into

It is a bold piece of programming and some of Wilder’s scenes are wonderfully crazy, with a mammoth and dinosaur wandering into the dining room. Wilder also plays terrific games with his audience as the production itself seems beset by disasters. At the final preview that I caught, David Troughton stepped out of character as Mr A to cancel the show due to cast injuries and was so convincing that half the row in front of me made for the exits. They surreally struggle to save the human race, inventing the wheel, surviving an Ice Age and an equally apocalyptic flood.

Staunton shines out, full of frustration and anxiety, though some biographers might take issue with Hastings’s storyline when Nora and Joyce rebuke Beckett for sleeping with, rather than for cold-shouldering, their daughter The two celebrated writers’ relationship is barely sketched. Perhaps Beckett is meant to gain in experience and sorrow but in Weyman’s performance he comes across as a blandly sympathetic clerk. More interesting is the fact that, just up the road, Michael Gambon is preparing to don the notorious dark glasses to play the compulsive storyteller, Hamm, while Crowley’s glaucoma-plagued Joyce sits dictating in an eye-patch and Weyman’s Beckett learns that Lucia finds comfort in her fantasies.Meanwhile, Thornton Wilder’s American family saga, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), proves extraordinarily wacky and a striking antecedent of Waiting For Godot as his suburban couple, Mr and Mrs Antrobus, keep pulling back from despair, insisting they must “begin again” However, a darned sight more happens here The Antrobuses don’t just live in the mid-20th century. Hall’s cast occasionally shifts into vaudevillian mode, very half-heartedly and, though Garai gains poignancy in the end, her Lucia often seems a hilarious loony for our light entertainment. Yet she seems driven by jealousy and confesses that her own marriage to Dermot Crowley’s outwardly respectable Joyce is a fiction. Garai’s Lucia also finds the dirty letters Nora penned for her husband.

We see Joyce encouraging his daughter and Beckett to invent words for his experimental novel, Finnegans Wake, but he represses talk about Lucia’s outbursts and, in another way, is evading plain speaking in his books.Hastings writes some beautiful poetic lines, but the tragicomic tone is awkward. However, Calico certainly suggests Joyce’s family was laced with Freudian complexes and that Lucia was partly maddened by the conflicting messages she received about sex, liberation and language within this lapsed Catholic household.
Lucia’s mother, Nora (Imelda Staunton), desperately objects to her son Giorgio living in sin. While Beckett may have favoured few words, Hastings objects to the silence surrounding her and strongly implies, in his programme notes, that the father-daughter relationship could have been incestuous The play does not actually say that outright. She ends up strapped to a bed in a mental hospital.Some of the ideas and facts behind this play are intriguing. Joyce’s estate has deliberately destroyed Lucia’s letters to her father and other material. The flip-side is she is going mad, uncontrollably utters embarrassing family secrets and yells lewd words. Beckett is taken on as Joyce’s assistant, and Lucia, a freewheeling dancer played by eager Romola Garai, falls for him.