Happy Days – The House, Birmingham Rep

Writer: Samuel Beckett

Director: Caitríona McLaughlin

William McEvoy recounts that Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider, directing the 1961 Happy Days production in New York, advising – ‘It’s a much more difficult job I’ve given you here than any so far – all poised on a razor-edge and no breathers anywhere.’ Nice one Sam, anything to help.

Siobhán McSweeney as Winnie, and director, Caitríona McLaughlin, ever aware of that iconic Jane Brown’s 1976 photo-portrait of Beckett; his tectonic-plate furrowed brows and hawk roosting, piercing gaze enough to keep any creatives on their talons, certainly do the trick for this evening’s stunning performance. They’ve honed a production jostled and wrought in the creative crucibles of the Cork Midsummer Festival at Cork Opera House, no less, and a following, reviews-running-riot run at 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin.

Given Beckett’s punctilious and dense directions, the opening pages of text consist as much of micromanaged intimacies as Winnie’s fractured monologue. Hardly surprising then, that when Billie Whitelaw was directed by the man himself, ‘..she could no longer endure the strain of Sam’s obsession with the pronunciation, tone and emphasis of each syllable.’

It might well be that Beckett made sure that Whitelaw’s ‘Brownie’ revolver was a blank replica. As for Ireland’s Landmark Productions of Happy Days? ‘Well, play it again, Sam,’ and don’t they just. And they do it their way. They’re cocked, revolver locked and loaded, bang-on-the-money.

‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ remarks King Duncan. He certainly paid the price for getting that one wrong. Tonight, Siobhán McSweeney golden-nails the character of Winnie with such immaculate conception a BAFTA will do – but the halo’s on order: Pope Francis on speed-dial.

‘Ah yes, if only I could bear to be alone, I mean prattle away with not a soul to hear,’ she declaims, McSweeney’s commanding visions of Winnie’s tortured heart, consumed within an emotional spectrum so vast, new tones and textured colours have yet to be invented – even beyond the ultra-violet and then some. A patina of increasing unease ranges from the numbing banal to the psychotic reaching its apotheosis when her parasol explodes.

In one of her character’s rare moments of lucid, extended monologue, amidst the synaptic shrapnel, her existential introspection underscores her precarious predicament. The absurdity of her situation, the increasing immersion in the mound of debris a febrile metaphor of her damaged soul. The mound tableau isn’t as much about ‘Getting it’ as allowing lateral indulgence, giving Beckett the loose-rein freedom to explore themes of loneliness, identity, loyalty, loss and betrayal within a surreal, meta-theatrical conceit.

McSweeney exploits a facial expressionist palette of near-infinite micro-gesture inferences, each one enunciated with her inimitable rolling of the tongue about her mouth: a contemplation of limitless possibilities and myriad, suggestive nuances.

This becomes hideously compromised by Act 2 where she is now near totally submerged in the barren landscape. A golden-hued Martian-like terrain, the conceit of Beckett’s original direction taken to its most brilliant exposition by designer, Jamie Vartan. Lighting designer, Paul Keogan, tests his mettle by teasing out the febrile nature of Winnie’s deconstruction, with stark contrasting patinas of the foreground tonality that incrementally consume her, juxtaposed against distant blue, monolithic horizons.

As for the situation Winnie finds herself in, waist-high in sterile earth, the eternal school of extended metaphors has its inevitable jamboree. Suffice to posit that it is simply an enigma consummated in the existential conflict of the human condition thrown to the Fates, revelling in the banality of ongoing, perpetual pathos. Possibly. But, being a good Catholic, Winnie already has enough on her plate placating God with exploratory, self-condemnation Acts of Contrition taken as a given.

What Beckett is warning us of through the cracked lenses of both Winnie and Willie’s crises is just how fragile and febrile our individual and collective identities can become through complacency, indifference or moral atrophy. Winnie’s distraught and incarcerated body is the final, flailing surrender exacerbated by Howard Teale’s Willie, with his pathetic attempt to surmount his own anonymity and reach out to touch her one last time – perhaps even the first.

Absurdly compelling, a comedy of contrary terrors, the debauchery of reason in Happy Days might be seen as an elegant counter-psalm to the cynical ennui of modern apathy. As relevant today as in its early 1960s premier, Beckett’s voice reaches out loud and clear – apathy leads to atrophy – civilisation hangs but by a thread and the Three Fates can be heard honing their scissors ever sharper. And, as for further contemporaneous allegory – look no further than the countless Winnies who see their womanhood, their femininity, motherhood and feminism under threat because their unique biology is at the judgemental whim of those who treat them as but a social construct.

This production not only takes the biscuit but hog-snouts in the trough of glorious – having your existential cake and eating it – forever.

Beckett’s synaptic shrapnel takes lethal aim.

Runs until 1 July 2023