Surrounded by her trinkets – her bag, her toothbrush, her parasol, her revolver – she sits buried up to her waist in a mound of sand, the great symbol of blind optimism battered by the tides of existential despair. Samuel Beckett’s 1961 masterpiece Happy Days bequeathed us Winnie, theatre’s enduring tragic fool, and we’ve been grappling with her meaning ever since. Is she delusional or heroic, myopic or a kind of seer?
On paper, the casting of Judith Lucy as Winnie seems counterintuitive. Lucy’s comedic persona is entirely wrapped up in a self-effacing irony, and irony is a quality Winnie almost certainly lacks. The bone dry wit Lucy has honed all her career – those withering barbs she directs at herself as often as others – feels like the polar opposite of Winnie’s prating cheerfulness. In performance, however, it feels wonderfully cohesive.
The play opens with “the bell”, a hideously jangling cacophony that announces the beginning of Winnie’s day and signals its end – ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for Winnie. What would seem an unbearable predicament to us, her imprisonment in that lifeless mound of sand, is for her a “great mercy”. This disconnect between her attitude and her objective reality is the source of the play’s humour as well as its horror.
Winnie prattles away about everything and nothing: “There is so little one can say, one says it all.” We soon realise that she isn’t quite alone, though. Her husband Willie (Hayden Spencer) lives in a hole in the mound, largely out of sight, as taciturn as she is loquacious. He is a strangely cryptic figure, a pantomime foil, largely there for Winnie to talk at. It certainly isn’t a marriage in any realistic sense; they are merely two people in close proximity caught in the “blaze of hellish light”.
Spencer is suitably brutish – when he gives a definition of the word hog as, “castrated male swine. Reared for slaughter”, he’s likely referring in part to himself – but it is Winnie’s play entirely, and Lucy rises admirably to the role’s myriad requirements. Where Lucy’s acting career to date has leant into her cynicism and imperviousness with predictable results, her Winnie leans in the other direction. The character’s effortful conviviality, her increasingly pathetic attempts to stave off hopelessness, are oddly ennobling. The abject torture of the play’s second act, with Winnie buried up to her neck as the sun beats mercilessly down on her, is quietly devastating.
Eugyeene Teh’s set design is effectively monolithic, and although it’s better than Malthouse Theatre’s mechanistic design for the play from 2009, it still feels oddly inorganic. His costumes, however, are wonderfully idiosyncratic. Winnie wears a rather sensual leather bodice – while we can see it – and Willie ends the play decked out in tails and a ludicrous top hat that make him look like an undertaker from Dr Seuss. Paul Kim’s lighting is moody and versatile, although that scorching heat could broil more. J David Franzke’s sound and composition is suitably discordant and menacing.
Petra Kalive directs with a potent control of tone and mood. The stewardship of Lucy’s performance is masterful: it makes what is ostensibly casting against type feel like a natural fit. There is no interval, which is a mistake – Beckett conceives the two acts as discrete depictions of time arrested, the tortures of accretion (of sand, of cares, of pain) and attrition (of life force, of hope, of vision) magnified by the audience’s exiting and re-entering of the space. Everything else is powerfully articulated.
Beckett was a dramatist of uncanny precision, meticulous about every movement of the actor’s body, tyrannical about set and lighting design, and his estate has kept a watchful eye on productions around the world since his death. It would be creatively stifling were it not for the fact that his works deal so often with stasis itself, with the stultifying immovability of existence. Kalive wisely lets the play do its work on us, imposing no single reading or contemporary lens, letting us sit in the play’s absurdist ambiguity. As Winnie says, “I suppose this would seem strange were it not that all seems strange.”
Lucy has long mined the humour of caustic despondency, but she finds something deeper and more disturbing in Winnie, a halting terror of the self. Beckett was the master of the subjunctive conditional: were he to see her play the role, would he approve? Thankfully, there is no answer to that. Lucy is our Winnie, and for now that will have to be enough.
MTC’s Happy Days is on at the Southbank Theatre, the Sumner until 10 June
