Someone once told me, “You don’t fuck with Beckett.” I agree. You don’t. You can’t. He is irrefutably one of the great geniuses of the Twentieth century. His words have become legend. ‘Waiting for Godot’ has become the vision of an entire age. ‘Endgame’ bashes our fears of our eventual ends in our faces. Beckett’s view of life, so effectively conveyed in his sometimes painfully absurd plays and writings, is one that pulled at the heartstrings of society when they were first published and performed and still offers us a brutally honest reflection of ourselves today. You may not be able to fuck with Beckett, but Beckett, however, loves to fuck with us. He presents to us scenarios, characters and anecdotes that haunt us for reasons we, most of the time, do not understand. In ‘Happy Days’ this is especially true. At least for me. ‘Happy Days’ in my view is one of Beckett’s darkest and most brutal plays. It is a rueful song that gets stuck in your head and haunts you for a long time after having read or seen it. Winnie, a woman in her older years, is stuck in a sand mound right up to her waist in the first act, presumably being swallowed by the earth. The setting is barren and the lights show the blazing sun beating down on an “expanse of scorched grass”. At the far side of the mound, a man sits, Willie. He is quiet for most of the time, his “marvellous gift”, as Winnie puts it, being his ability to sleep through even the worst of the day and Winnie’s ramblings. She ploughs through her day, stuck in one place, only her bag and belongings, a toothbrush and a gun named “Brownie” amongst many others, keeping her company and keeping her occupied. The second act opens with Winnie buried even further down into the mound, only her head sticking out. Her predicament now seems clear and definite. She is being swallowed. And she can’t help it. What is most haunting perhaps is the genius way in which Beckett has created Winnie as character. Her predicament is obviously grave and calls for woeful cries of desperation if not total depression. However, despite this, she insists that it is a “Happy day”. She insist on hoping against a bleak and certain future. She fills her days with obsessive rambling to Willie and herself as well as her bag full of things. Speaking and keeping busy becomes her reason for living, her words are mostly meaningless and only there to fill a seemingly feared silence and what realisations or truths it may bring with it. It is upsetting, and beautifully so, that there seems to be a simultaneous wanting in Winnie to leave the mound and get out of it and to stay there choosing to ignore it, perhaps even an attachment to it. In the other Beckett plays, the characters almost always recognise that their situations are bleak and depressing. In ‘Happy Days’ however, Winnie seems to ignore that or is even naïve of that fact. As long as she has her bag and her ramblings it will be yet another happy day. As Winnie says:“There is of course the bag.She turns towards it.There will always be the bag.”In terms of performabilty, ‘Happy Days’ may be excessively challenging. The actress who has to play Winnie is stuck in one place and has only her upper body and, later, only her head to convey the character’s emotions, objectives and subtext. And there’s a lot of that! The director has little to no room for blocking which is one of their biggest tricks to pull out of the bag and rely on. Winnie has most of the talking time and the action can be very exhausting, I think. However, I believe that Beckett knew these challenges that the performers and directors would face when he wrote the play. He came up with a solution in the writing itself. And it screams Beckett! The solutions lies in his excessive use and meticulous focus on the stage directions. They are specific. They are to the point and they allow for little room outside of them. Like Beckett’s infamous pauses (with which you definitely cannot fuck) the stage directions in ‘Happy Days’ should be followed to the tee. They are as important as the dialogue and just as you can never cut or change the dialogue, the general consensus being that every word has been specifically crafted for a specific use, this is true for the stage directions in ‘Happy Days’. The production would fail otherwise. Of course, as with a lot of Beckett’s works, there is always the chance that the audiences, readers included, may not connect with the piece because of the sometimes intimidating barriers they have to cross to get to the deeper meanings of the play, to understand it. ‘Happy Days’ may easily become one of those cases. One setting, one character mostly just rambling on and on. To those who are not able to cross the barrier or do not want to, it can quickly become a bag full of bullshit. Although, I have been able to cross that barrier and thus appreciate the ways in which the play represents a bleak view of man’s life and the way he lives it, I understand that others may not. This can result in a lot of yawns by the start of the second act, I can imagine. Beckett, if nothing else, is never patronising. He does not spoon-feed his audiences. He almost refuses to. There lies the beauty of his work, it can mean anything to anyone if only they cross the barrier. People like to say of Absurdist theatre that it is meaningless. On that statement I have one response- Now that’s bullshit!There is also a very sharp and poking humour present in the midst of it all. I laugh even though I don’t. As Beckett wrote in ‘Endgame’, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness…it’s the most comical thing in the world.” It was true in ‘Endgame’ and it is true again in ‘Happy Days’. As I said, Beckett likes to fuck with us, but you never fuck with him.
At the start of Happy Days, we see Winnie - a plump, fifty-year-old housewife of a woman – buried to her waist in the centre of a mound of earth. The sun blazes down in the form of a powerful spotlight. A barren landscape stretches into the distance. Beside Minnie on the mound are a large bag and a parasol. Throughout the play, she removes items from the bag, including a Browning automatic revolver (‘Brownie’) and a toothbrush. Halfway through the first of two short acts the parasol bursts into flames from the unrelenting heat. At the start of the play she seems to be alone, but soon we see that there is a man (Willie) on the far side of the mound, reading a newspaper, though we see only the back of his head for the whole of the first act. He only crawls over the mound to face Winnie in a dramatic and moving scene at the end of the play, when she is buried to her neck in the mound. Winnie does most of the talking, addressing many of her comments to Willie, and he responds only occasionally and briefly. When she seems to be nodding off at times she is brought awake again by an unseen bell.At a first reading this play, like all of Beckett’s plays, leaves you with a vague sense of depression and incomprehension, though you do also feel a sense of achievement in having got through it from beginning to end and of having read something worthwhile. Subsequent readings throw up all sorts of allusions and echoes that completely escaped you the first time, and if you then (and only then) read a guide to the play you recognise it for the masterpiece it is: a highly-polished jewel, a starkly concentrated appraisal of the human condition packed into two short acts, that lesser writers would and do take volumes to laboriously spell out. Despite seeming a rambling, knocked-off-in-ten-minutes affair, it is in fact a highly sophisticated interplay of repetition and variation with leitmotifs, silence and precise movements that are all indicated in the meticulous stage directions, and is almost operatic in its effect.Beckett is never patronising, he leaves you (perhaps somewhat dismissively) to work out for yourself what it is all about. Scratch the surface and you will find allusions to Zeno, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Anglican Liturgy and Holy Communion and Dante, as well as The Merry Widow. You may see it, with A. Alvarez, as ‘a sour view of a cosy marriage’, or agree with The Times that ‘the text is an elaborate structure of internal harmonies with recurring clichés twisted into bitter truths, and key phrases chiming ironically through the development as in a passacaglia’. For me, it is all of these things, but perhaps most of all it is a comment on ageing, loneliness and loss. It will haunt all who see it or read it.
What do You think about Happy Days (1998)?
"Poor Willie - running out - ah well - can't be helped - just one of those old things - another of those old things - just can't be cured - cannot be cured - ah yes - poor dear Willie - good Lord! - good God! - ah well - no worse - no better, no worse - no change - no pain - hardly any - great thing that - nothing like it - pure ... what? - what? - ah yes - poor Willie - no zest - for anything - no interest - in life - poor dear Willie - sleep for ever - marvelous gift - in my opinion - always said so - wish I had it"
—Giorgi Komakhidze
She decays into sands of time caught, struck in memories of happy days of past and the hopeless hope of a future that would resemble more to the past than the present; her hopes are of a really old bird who can no longer fly or even if it could fly it won't enjoy as much as it once did - and yet this bird looks up to skies and hopes; hopes like her too down-to-earth husband doesn't. Her surroundings like her body are just ruins of happy days of past, her hope is as depressing as her husband's pessimism and she wants to run away from it; she want to talk - talk, talk, talk herself out of it but with whom; her husband is no good at communications or may be he has just given it up as useless. And thus the two are struck in loneliness of married lives. She is understanding or has, over the time, come to accept as the fate, her husband's inability to communicate. In their own way, they do care of each other and maybe in some depressed, degraded form of word, 'love' each other. She herself is unable to communicate her feelings. In fact, she no longer knows what she feels- does she want her husband dead? does her husband love him? does she love him? should she sing? should she dare hope? She is scared of free time in which she may end up thinking about those things - and so she slows carry her routine activities - activities that do not involve thinking; routines she won't let herself break from -routine activities which are only religion .... and in her, in this woman crushed by time, one finds the meaning of meaninglessness of time.Read it when you have a Disney movie at hand. Do not read it if you are middle aged housewife .... or are married ... or are human.
—Sidharth Vardhan
Να έχω υπάρξει πάντα αυτή που είμαι - και να είμαι τόσο διαφορετική απ΄αυτή που ήμουν.
—Nadine
