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 The Theatreguide.London Review

For the archive we have filed reviews of several past productions of Beckett's Happy Days together. Scroll down for the one you want, or just browse.

Felicity Kendall 2003 - Fiona Shaw 2007 - Juliet Stevenson 2014

Samuel Beckett is the greatest writer of the Twentieth Century and, with the possible addition of Franz Kafka, the most essential. And Happy Days is one of his true masterpieces.

I just thought I had better make that clear, as preparation for saying that, even though this new production starring Felicity Kendal is seriously flawed, it is still a must-see for anyone who has never seen the play. It is just too good a work, and major productions only come along about once a decade.

This is the virtual monologue (there is a second, almost speechless role, adequately played here by Col Farrell) of a woman we first meet buried up to her waist in sand; by Act Two she's buried up to her neck.

Despite this powerful visual symbol of mortality, she is remarkably cheery. Despite - or perhaps because of - being not very bright, she manages to find ways to make it through each day with a combination of reminiscence, little rituals and the capacity for joy in the tiny pleasures and surprises life still offers.

And so, says Beckett, if she can do it, then there must be some inherent capacity for survival built into the human animal - we literally don't know how NOT to make it through the day and keep on going.

(Beckett fans will recognise a thematic tie to Waiting for Godot. It's plays like this, with their reassurance that, no matter how little you allow for human strength, we can still survive, that won him the Nobel Prize.)

The challenge to an actress playing Winnie is to communicate the paradoxical combination of air-headed triviality and unconquerable steel, and one would think that Felicity Kendal's gamin quality would work very nicely in this role.

But oddly she has been directed by Peter Hall to suppress all her Felicity-Kendal-ness and just race through the lines in a flat near-gabble.

Her Winnie has neither charm nor innocence; she's just a mouthpiece for a rush of words. They are brilliant words, and they survive the underplaying, but even a master like Beckett deserves some help from a production, and he gets very little here.

This production reinforces my suspicion that there are two directors out there named Sir Peter Hall. The one who occasionally works at the National Theatre or the RSC is brilliant. The one who works in the West End is terrible.

In addition to evidently offering his star little guidance in the role and even suppressing what she might have brought to it, director Peter Hall has allowed designer Lucy Hall to create a set that screams misunderstanding of (if not overt contempt for) the play.

In place of Beckett's mound of earth,  clearly a metaphor for the encroaching grave, Lucy Hall has created a vertical target-like spiral with Felicity Kendal's head popping out of the bullseye.

There are so many irrelevant suggestions to this picture - at moments she looks like Lewis Carroll's caterpillar, at others like the singing happy-face flower of a children's cartoon - and none of the simple horror of Beckett's image, that it is hard to imagine what they thought they were doing.

And yet this IS one of the last century's greatest plays. I spoke afterwards with someone who hadn't known it before, and he said that he quickly tuned out the actress and the set and just listened to the words, and was enthralled. And I fear that it is only if you do the same that I can heartily recommend this revival.

Gerald Berkowitz

Happy Days
Lyttelton Theatre Spring 2007

I am such a fan of Fiona Shaw that I would happily watch her act even if she was buried up to her neck in the earth, and of course that's what I just did, for half of Samuel Beckett's play.

This is the one in which the woman is buried up to her waist in Act One and her neck in Act Two, who still manages to maintain her sense of wonder, her capacity for happiness and her ability to go on - Beckett's frequently comic reassurance that the human animal simply does not know how not to survive.

And Shaw is by far the best thing in what is otherwise a surprisingly misconceived, misdesigned and misdirected production.

Her interpretation is closer to Billie Whitelaw's than Peggy Ashcroft's (to name the two great Winnies of the past) - a Winnie who is aware of the existential horrors she is warding off and who uses her intelligence and determination to hold them at bay. (Ashcroft's terminally silly woman, triumphing without realising she was, may actually have made a more optimistic statement.)

Shaw's great talent has always been to anchor the most extreme characters in a solid reality, and her Winnie is a no-nonsense Dublin housewife at heart, getting through her symbolic trials as she might cope with unemployment or any other domestic setback, through sheer roll-up-your-sleeves grit.

You don't feel, as the other two great Winnies (in their different ways) made you feel, that her triumph is assured, but you do know that if she goes down, she'll go down fighting.

She is, of course, also frequently very funny, particularly in her throw-away readings of some of Beckett's lines.

But, as I said, there is almost nothing else to like about this production, and a lot to dislike immensely. We can begin with Tom Pye's set design.

Instead of the single mound of earth Beckett calls for, Pye fills the large Lyttelton stage with the jumble of a bomb site, full of chunks of concrete and bits of rubbish, and with a rear projection suggesting that this goes on for miles.

Instead of letting us discover Winnie stuck in the middle of this, we first see the brightly-lit stage set without her, then a semi-transparent half-curtain descends and we see the shapes of stagehands helping the actress into position and scampering off, and only then do we find her in her mound - all totally destroying the intended effect.

And the mound itself is so badly designed that from most of the audience she merely looks like she's sitting behind a cluttered desk, rather than being stuck in the earth. (The buried-up-to-her-neck effect is equally unconvincing).

There might be some reason for turning the almost silent Willie (Tim Potter) from an old man to a yob in his undershirt, but its point is lost and the effect is just disconcerting.

Meanwhile, for all the strong effects in Fiona Shaw's performance, her Irish accent is allowed to wax and wane in what is simply sloppy direction.

The semi-comic moment of Winnie's parasol catching fire is turned into an excessively large firebomb going off in another part of the stage - and surely surely surely it is a mistake to play that rock'n'roll song from the TV sitcom of the same name during the interval.

All these flaws and errors of judgement must ultimately be laid at the feet of director Deborah Warner, which is the biggest shock of all, since virtually everything Warner has ever directed has been brilliant and excitingly right.

But even Homer nods, and we must just write this off as a rare and curious misstep by the director.

Gerald Berkowitz

Happy Days
Young Vic Theatre  January - February 2014; February - March 2015

Director Natalie Abrahami and actress Juliet Stevenson have found a newly dark reading of Samuel Beckett's masterpiece (ranking only just below Waiting For Godot in his canon) that will intrigue those who know the play while being fully accessible to those coming to it for the first time. 

A woman inexplicably buried up to her waist – and later, to her neck – in the ground chatters cheerfully, goes through her daily rituals, and generally makes the best of things. 

Scholars can debate the exact meaning of the central visual metaphor – the hourglass-like passage of time, the journey into the grave – while everyone instinctively responds to it as some non-specific essence of mortality.

So the usual interpretation of the play is that if this silly chatterbox can make it through whatever life throws at her, then survival must be hard-wired into the human character. We can make it through life because we don't know how not to. 

But far more than any others I've seen, Juliet Stevenson's Winnie is aware of the emptiness and despair that hover at the edge of her consciousness and that she must constantly fight to repress.

She is not cheery by nature, but as a political act, a refusal to give in, and in the course of the play we see the toll that the unending struggle takes on her. 

Winnie is not alone in the play. Just at the edge of the stage, barely within her sight line, is Willy (David Beames, generously supporting in this thankless role), a decrepit old man (husband? lover?) to whom she speaks and from whom she gets the rare grudging response.

Stevenson's Winnie is far more dependent than usual on Willy (or at least the faith that he's still there), approaching real panic when he doesn't respond, just as she does a few other times when her coping mechanisms seem in momentary danger of breaking down. 

Stevenson also lets us see Winnie's energy levels vary, her battery running down a couple of times and her ability to remain optimistic waning dangerously.

So, instead of the play reassuring us that survival is built into the human condition so that even an empty-headed ditz like Winnie can carry on without even trying, director and actress make it tell us that survival is a constant struggle but that even Winnie can find the strength and determination to keep fighting to the end. 

There are things to argue with here. In Tom Gibbons' sound design the cosmic alarm clock that rings to start and punctuate Winnie's days is given a loud, harsh and ominous quality that suggests an actively unfriendly God rather than Beckett's blank universe, while Vicki Mortimer's set, placing Winnie at the base of a hill prone to pebble-slides, gives a too-literal explanation for the visual image that should be allowed to resonate on its own. 

There is more than one Hamlet occupying Shakespeare's play, and there may be differing versions of Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot. Juliet Stevenson and Natalie Abrahami show us an unexpected version of Winnie in this Happy Days. 

The vision of existence is darker, but the message remains cautiously positive, and both this particular play and our appreciation of Beckett are enriched.

Gerald Berkowitz