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.

A Season in the Congo, Young Vic, 24.8.13

Patrice Lumumba c1960

Aimé Césaire’s 1966 anti-colonial play about Congolese independence from Belgium in 1960 was rather a hagiography of Patrice Lumumba. A humanist, idealist and former beer salesman, Lumumba was briefly the Congo's first Prime Minister, before being butchered only a year into office by Katangan secessionists in league with his successor Mobutu.

Playwright Césaire was a Paris-based Martinican who wrote in French and astonishingly this Young Vic production was billed as the British premiere of his work, in a translation by Ralph Manheim. It was also the theatrical debut for cinema director Joe Wright (of ‘Atonement’ fame), who came onto the stage with the cast for this final show in the run to a rapturous reception from the audience. 

General Mobutu Sese Seko

 This was energized physical theatre and the passionate Malcolm-X-style performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor (star of TV’s ‘Dancing on the Edge’) partly compensated for an intermittently over-rhetorical script.  Amongst the (all-black) other players, Daniel Kaluuya effectively captured Mobutu’s transition from sidekick to thuggish coup leader, while Joseph Mydell was a benign President Kasavubu, who inadvertently paved the way to Mobutu’s 32 year disastrous kleptomaniac reign.



Playwright Aime Cesaire

Surreal Brechtian-style puppet heads brandishing US and Soviet flags were combined with actors wearing prosthetic white noses to symbolise the malign impact of Belgian bankers and external Cold War rivalries on events in the Congo. All the familiar tropes of 'Africa-through-Western-eyes' were thrown into the mix: pumped-up beret-wearing hoodlums wielding machine guns like penis-extensions, a shaman chattering in a tribal language, steamy tropical brothels with slinky batik-clad whores and heavily sexualised drumbeats (from DRC Music’s ‘Kinshasa One Two’). 

Comparing it with Lynn Nottage’s more restrained ‘Ruined’ at the Almeida in 2010 (which focused on the end of Mobutu's rule), you might conclude that, for all the show's gusto and the ecstatic audience response, more might have been achieved with less.