Happy Days, Young Vic, 10.2.14



Juliet Stevenson as Winnie in
the Young Vic's 2014 'Happy Days'

Man:  "What's it meant to mean?  Stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground?"
His wife:  "And you, what's the idea of you?  What are you meant to mean?"

Peggy Ashcroft (who took the role in 1975) described Winnie, the protagonist of Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’, as 'the summit part’ for any actress, the female equivalent of ‘King Lear’.  


Stevenson in 1991's 'Death and the Maiden'
at the Royal Court

Shamingly, this was Motley's first exposure to the play, although I first saw Juliet Stevenson, the star of the show, as far back as 1991, playing Paulina in Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden” (with just the right mixture of vulnerability and vengefulness).  Her comic timing as Amanda in the NT’s 1999 production of ‘Private Lives’ was so perfect it demanded a rare repeat ticket purchase.  And she was excellent too as Stephanie, the violinist laid low by MS, in the Almeida’s 2009 revival of Tom Kempinski’s ‘Duet for One’.  Few actresses are so good at conveying spirited suffering. 


Stevenson & Anton Lesser in
the NT's 1999 'Private Lives'

It was, inevitably, a rather different actress on display in Natalie Abrahimi’s Young Vic production of Beckett’s threnody.  



Stevenson & Henry Goodman in the
Almeida's 2009 'Duet for One'

Now 57, Stevenson bravely performed entirely without make-up and opted (unlike Eileen Atkins in 2012’s stand-out production of ‘All That Fall’) to play Winnie sans brogue.  Stevenson played Winnie naturalistically, trying to 'keep on' and 'muddle through' with typical English middle class phlegm (“Another heavenly day. Begin Winnie. Begin your day”).
  

Juliet Stevenson does battle with Winnie's demons

The slapstick humour of Beckett’s early works (‘All That Fall’, ‘Waiting for Godot’) had darkened considerably by the time ‘Happy Days’ was written in 1960, towards the height of the nuclear panic.  It's a kind of distillation of Beckett’s work, a somewhat static meditation on the fear of extinction ("To sing a song too soon is a great mistake, I find"), on ageing (“To have been always what I am – and so very changed from what I was”) and on the inadequacy of language to mitigate those processes (“Words fail. There are times when even they fail.  ...  There is so little one can say, one says it all. All one can. And no truth in it anywhere.”). 

Famously, Winnie is progressively buried alive up to her waist in Act One and up to her neck in Act Two, wreathed in a type of shingle surgical collar, while her grunting husband (“my Willie!”) busies himself inconsequentially to one side, largely failing to engage and mysteriously neglecting to dig her out.  

Winnie startled by an insect

Designer Vicki Mortimer had erected a jagged escarpment as the setting for Winnie's confinement, giving her a bird’s eye view over the stalls but emphasising her vulnerability to rock-slides. Nerve-jangling metallic roars, like tectonic plates
shifting beneath her trapped feet, marked the passage of time:  a device considerably more insistent than Chekhov's 'breaking string' but serving much the same function. 

Predictably, of course, nothing much happened.  The tragicomic Winnie (“if only I could bear to be alone”) prattled away, stream-of-consciousness-style, progressively emptying her handbag, with dogged but transparently artificial optimism, trying to keep her spirits up as the end approached (“ah well – no worse – no better, no worse – no change – no pain – hardly any – a great thing that – nothing like it”). 


"Things have a life.  Take my looking-glass, it doesn't need me"

The challenge for the lead in 'Happy Days', amply fulfilled here by Stevenson, is to act in progressively more 'minimal' fashion, making use of first hand movements and then face movements to compensate for her immobilisation and slow decline.  



Monsieur B lui-meme

Winnie finally makes peace with approaching death by breaking into song (“It is perhaps a little soon – to make ready – for the night – and yet I do – make ready for the night – feeling it at hand – saying to myself Winnie – it will not be long now, Winnie”).  Stevenson powerfully stayed silently buried up to her neck on stage as the lights dimmed and the audience filed out, hushed in the presence of great art. 

Beckett (then 56) never wrote anything as good again.