1991
Happy Days
by Samuel Beckett
State Theatre Company
Playhouse., July, 1991
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
“What’s the idea ? he says -stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground- What does it mean? he says -What’s it meant to mean ?” Playfully self-referential, Samuel Beckett pre-empts the familiar response to his work. What is he trying to say ? What do his plays represent ? His patient reply was always that his plays mean what they are, if there was another way of saying it, he would have said so. Commentators and audiences have often found this maddeningly blithe, the sly old obscurantist having a knowing joke.
Seeing Ruth Cracknell up to her diddies in this excellent State/ Sydney Theatre Company co-production of Happy Days, the abstract questions that arise from reading the text, or pondering the idea of the play give way instantly. We become captivated by the theatrical reality of Beckett’s work. It is visually, vocally and emotionally engrossing, the experience is, literally, spellbinding. That doesn’t mean it is easy -we all find ourselves agitated, uncomfortable, even irritated at times. But that is all a part of it, along with the jokes, the whimsies and the epiphanies. When language is distilled down this far even a word like zephyr is a breath of fresh air.
Happy Days, as its vaudeville title suggests, is quite a distance from the geriatric purgatory of Watt or Malone or Krapp with his spools of ghostly memory. Like Estragon and Vladimir in Godot, Winnie is a cheery soul. Another heavenly day, she exults at the very beginning of the play, oblivious or at least resigned to being half way to the grave. Hail holy light she says in Act Two, by now a talking head but still irrepressibly looking for something to stare at or something to say. Her husband Willie is rarely listening, or replies only with a monosyllabic non-sequitur. But Winnie, like the tramps in Godot, is consoled by the presence of another -alive, dead, comatose it doesn’t matter. Someone is looking at me still, she exclaims, that is what I find so wonderful.
As Winnie, Ruth Cracknell is splendid. Unfazed by the physical rigour of the role, she explores the vocal and thematic shadings of the text with painstaking care. Richly comic, she resists any temptation to make Winnie a sit-down comedian. Her fear, tetchiness, perplexity and vulnerability is precisely, touchingly rendered as is an almost unexpected elation which suffuses the whole production.
Director Simon Phillips has uncovered the celebratory elements in the play -the situation may be hopeless but it will, after all, be another happy day. This sense of radiance owes much to Mary Moore’s design, surely one of her best ever. The stage directions call for a grassy mound with an expanse of plain and sky receding into the distance. Moore has varied this with a cinemascopic sweep of crusty mudflat of the kind that surrounds Winnie herself. The effect is a huge T shape with the horizontal line suspended in blackness above the mound which cascades out of the proscenium on a thrust platform. It is a literal setting suggesting something from the Central desert while at the same time, drenched in the golden ochre-ish tones of Karen Norris’s excellent lighting design, it becomes almost unaccountably transcendent. It is an inspired idea to make a Beckett production look so luscious -in this play it perfectly reflects the equivocations of the character.
Again, Simon Phillips has created a pleasingly accessible production of a classic work. Newcomers to Beckett will not do better than this Happy Days while afficionados will find in the work of performers Ruth Cracknell and Allan Penney and designers Mary Moore and Karen Norris, an enriched, localised and beautifully lucid account of the play.
The Adelaide Review, No.89, June, 1991, p.p27. Reprinted in The Sydney Review.