'Happy Days' features one of Beckett's most famous metaphors encapsulated in an extraordinary visual image: a middle-aged woman buried up to her waist in a mound. Although this image is hardly realistic, except in the context of seaside holidays, 'Happy Days' seems to me to be Beckett's most tangible work, the one most rooted in an everyday reality - marriage - rather than something vaguely universal.
Winnie is buried in this mound just as many women find themselves buried in the mound of everyday life, with its oppressive repetitiveness, the need for an inane optimism just to get through the day, terrified you won't have enough to do to fill up that vast chasm. It is a life where mundane things assume hysterically important proportions, because human contact with one's spouse has been reduced to brief grunts and pained silence, where one's husband is so used to married life he no longer cares about concealing objectionable personal habits, living in his own hole, totally wrapped up in himself, his own interests and vanity.
Some people have argued that Winnie is thick and self-deluded in her chirping merriment, her refusal to see reality for what it is - one look at Beckett's text and Rosaline Linehen's performance show only too clearly how self-aware lonely Winnie is, with her sense of failure, of promise unfulfilled, of companionship brutalised by the everyday. Her barren marriage in a barren landscape is linked to the childlessness of the union - 'I cannot conceive': like Hamm and Clov in 'Endgame', they are the last inhabitants of a blasted planet, markers of a dying humanity.
Like 'Play', this is a vision of life - and specifically marriage - as hell on earth. And yet the play, as so often with Beckett, is frequently hilarious, full of puns and doubles entendres, and although Winnie may never win, here response to existence is surely more winning than her husband's.
Patricia Rozema's stylistic restraint may surprise admirers of her masterpiece 'Mansfield Park' - there is no camera movement and very few cuts - creating a sense of inertia and immobility appropriate to Beckett. Although Beckett's play is fundamentally domestic, Rozema extends his metaphor, and sets it in a vast, stony, wind-strewn Tenerife desert, suggesting the endlessness of Winnie's turmoil, and making the work less specific, more universal, in keeping with her general interpretation of Beckett's work, which she sees as genderless. If Rozema's 'theatricality' is more faithful to Beckett, monotony is flirted with, as it should: it's a monotonous life - as spectators we are lucky, we can get up and leave. Poor Winnie's only progress is to be even further buried.
