Review: HAPPY DAYS, Riverside Studios

Photo credit: Helen Maybanks

Legend recalls that Irish playwright Samuel Beckett wrote Happy Days on a friend’s challenge request. Said friend allegedly asked Beckett to write a happy play. Recognising that separating the comic from the tragic was hard, he mentioned that comedy, with its “intuition of the absurd,” was more despairing as it offers no way out. And Happy Days is a play that confronts both the audience and actors about this, during an outstanding play, in a symbolic place. Intrinsically linked to Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios where the first rehearsal of Waiting for Godot was played, it seems fitting that as the Studios reopen, their first offering is the 60th anniversary production of Happy Days. 

First scheduled to run between February and March 2021, the play was postponed until 17 June and marks the second Beckett collaboration between Irish actor and writer Lisa Dwan, known as a Beckettian stage specialist, and the revered Sir Trevor Nunn. Produced by Anthology Theatre, in association with Riverside Studios, the play will be presented until 25 July.

Giving a familiar taste for everyone in this context, the play follows two trapped characters, in a non-disclosed, timeless, almost other worldly position, but in the strict pace of “the bell for waking and the bell for sleep” to mark their days. As the two protagonists Winnie and Willie appear, each one trapped in their mound, the play unveils Beckett’s own absurd vision. As the radiant and stoic Winnie, complete with 1950s desperate housewife glamour with bright red lipstick and a black strappy dress, she starts her everyday routine with “oh what a happy day”, with her brusque and occasionally laconic husband Willie installed behind her. As time goes by, she takes centre stage as she recalls memories and conversations, along with quotes from Yeats, Shakespeare, and the Bible, with some inevitable questions to the monosyllabic Willie, who intervenes to read newspaper headlines out loud or to answer succinctly to Winnie. 

Lisa Dwan is phenomenal during her almost 2-hour-long monologue. In her entirely static position, which demands everything from the central actor in this specific play, Dwan shows off her extraordinary vocal range and emotion, sometimes almost declaiming her words like poetry, and plays every contour and internal voice of the resilient Winnie, but also a Winnie very close to the edge, both literally and metaphorically. Trapped in a mound of earth, she is the vibrant part of this marital duo and Simon Wolfe, as Willie with a recognisable canotier hat and moustache, brings physical comedy to the other half of the duo. He is sometimes the responding echo and physical presence of Winnie in the playful and entertaining first act but he is the only silent one to move in the second act when the play takes a tragic turn, with a mysterious force dragging Winnie into the ground.

Their marital relationship is entirely visible, with silences and domestic resentment, but in an eyes-rolling old-style comedy way, no big gestures and moves are needed; everything is present in Winnie’s voice. She contains all of her fears, deceptions, worries, joy and anger and by Willie’s unexpected answers. 

The second half brings with it a distinct contrast. Winnie is not only buried neck deep but she’s almost unrecognisable and Willie makes a physical appearance like a character out of a silent movie, trying to converge to Winnie’s trap and looking at each other for the first time since the beginning. Dwan’s voice changes radically and so does the lighting and sound with this almost echoing in the background. She brings another Winnie, her red fixated smile and her cheerful personality absent. So this is a haunted Winnie, grim-faced and concerned who still doesn’t question her environment nor their dilemma and why she’s imprisoned in this manner but expects something bad.

What a grandiose anniversary play brought by director Trevor Nunn! Especially with this almost illusion of cinema screen decor, figured by a incredible post-apocalyptic panoramic landscape painted by designer Robert Jones, with a brown, grey and faded green colour palette and a subtle and unusual atmosphere created by Tim Mitchell’s lighting effects and Johnny Edwards’ sound design, which perfectly accompanies the play’s exigences, especially in the second act. 

As is often the case with a playwright like Samuel Beckett and some of his contemporaries who brings abstract, complex and sous-entendu themes, it can seem uneasy and dense to approach but this accomplished production, with a magistral led performance by Lisa Dwan, is a reminder of Beckett’s words and the cast’s talent, as well as a magnificent discovery for a first time audience to Beckett’s work.

**** Four stars

Reviewed by: Alexia Irene

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