Beckett's "Happy Days' in Brooklyn

Beckett and the hard job of being human

ROBERT ZALLER

The London production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, directed by Deborah Warner and starring the Irish actress Fiona Shaw, has settled into the suitably blitzed-out environment of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater for its New York run. The Harvey, for those who haven’t seen it, is deliberately furnished as a ruin, with peeling facades, exposed brickwork and chipped columns. It might be a commentary on the state of our civilization or the plight of its theater, or just an indulgence in what Rose Macaulay called the pleasure of ruins. It’s an apt if somewhat baroque setting for the last in the postwar, post-apocalyptic Beckett trilogy that includes Waiting for Godot and Endgame.

Each of these plays is essentially a duet, Waiting for Godot between the tramps Didi and Gogo, Endgame between the master and servant Hamm and Clov (essentially an extrapolation of two minor characters in Godot, Pozzo and Lucky), and Happy Days between a middle-class couple, Winnie and Willie. Each is set in a vaguely barren, blasted landscape; that of Waiting for Godot might be a heath, but both Endgame and Happy Days make direct reference to dire if unspecified events that have ravaged the earth. We are and are not invited to interpret this as a nuclear winter of some sort; Willie, who lives on a slope and sleeps in a dugout, still appears to receive his daily paper, or at least to dutifully reread an old one.

Trapped from the waist down

Winnie, in contrast, is trapped in a kind of fumarole that encloses her from the waist down. Only moles can penetrate her, as one appears to do at one point in the play, and since she can only twist from side to side she cannot see Willie or even verify his existence during silences that can last for days and are broken chiefly by monosyllabic grunts. So the play is really Winnie’s, and the dialogue a near-monologue in which Willie is mostly a suppositional ear.

Like many wives, Winnie has in fact mastered the art of talking to and for herself even while notionally addressing someone else. It remains desperately important to her, however, that at least the possibility of an auditor continues. Desertion is an issue in Waiting for Godot and Endgame, too, but for Winnie it is a constant preoccupation. Her long, circular monologues are a preparation for abandonment or widowhood in a world in which no one else exists (although that, like much else in Happy Days, is “uncertain”).

A towering role for an actress

Winnie is a heroine because, while she does not rebel against her absurd world, she does not submit to it, either. Determined that each day should be happy, she doles out her repertoire of clichéd memories, observations and formulaic repetitions, taking care only that she not exhaust them before the daily bell for sleep sounds (there no longer appears to be a night). So, as we are invited to appreciate, do we all. There will come a time, Winnie realizes, “when words must fail” and silence will fall for good. That will be the day after the happy days, and it will be the one that doesn’t end. To escape it is impossible; to fend it off is all one’s duty.

This is a towering role for an actress. Winnie must be pathetic yet also sympathetic and, as I have suggested, a touch heroic. Irene Worth, in her memorable performance, managed to sound all these notes. Fiona Shaw bears down hard on the last one, somewhat to the detriment of the other two. The crushing pathos of the line, “That is what I find so wonderful,” which Winnie trots out at repeated intervals to master her despair, is a flag of defiance for Shaw; and though that is a valid reading, it is also a limiting one. Winnie is in a battle for her life, but all too often here she seems to be selling war bonds.

Tom Pye’s set strikes a grandiloquent note too. Instead of the simple dirt mound called for by Beckett, Winnie is embedded in a cratered landscape that, covering the stage, suggests the ruins of a city, while a painted backdrop implies the wasteland beyond. Endgame does allude to a shattered, uninhabitable world, but Winnie’s predicament is as much existential as apocalyptic, and the fierce bell that summons her to and from sleep suggests a malefic order of things that mere bombs cannot produce. Winnie’s willed optimism in the face of the inalterable facts of life is our own: absurd, no doubt; pathetic, certainly; but also, movingly, an affirmation of the hard job of being human.