’s Winnie, the hapless, half-buried heroine of his 1961 play, Happy Days, is one of those pinnacle roles in theatre. Comparisons to Hamlet are common, but apt. It’s such an actor’s role that it makes sense, arguably with certain caveats, that the actor in question takes up at least one directorial rein. It certainly makes sense to Sydney Theatre Company, who are giving us the legendary (Belvoir’s August: Osage County) directed by (and ) in this production.
Winnie (Rabe) is immured in a mound of earth up to her waist. She wears what might be a faded ball gown. Harsh light beats down on the dark ground (which looks hand-painted) and a kind of horizontal proscenium structure is reminiscent of a CinemaScope screen or the jagged glow of a flatscreen TV, further heightening the sense of artificiality – or at least, a kind of constructed reality.
But Winnie is all too human and real. She fends off the sun’s rays with a broken umbrella, she comments on her station (although we’re never given much context in regards to how she got where we find her), she chats with her laconic husband, Willie (a fantastic and funny physical performance from ) who occasionally drags himself onto the stage, but rarely into her field of vision. Above all else, she tries to maintain an upbeat attitude, repeatedly declaring this to be yet another “happy day”. Even after the second act arrives, following a dark and ominous interlude (’s eerie sound design is impressive) and we see she’s now buried up to her neck.
Leaving the theatre after the final curtain was a lot like waking from a dream...
Beckett’s eternal optimist, Winnie is as complex a creation as to ever be performed on stage, and in Rabe’s hands she is at once a hugely comic figure as she hectors the largely silent Willie for some kind of acknowledgement, and a figure of vast pathos as she mindfully curates her meagre collection of trinkets for the little joys they spark. Reduced to near-helplessness, but taking comfort in the mundane rituals and everyday minutiae – we can surely all relate.
Schlieper handles sets and lights (which are deceptively simple yet effective), along with Rabe’s virtuosic performance and Gregory’s unsettling, at times nearly subliminal soundscape, to produce an almost hypnogogic effect, drawing the audience into a weirdly liminal experience, as though we were entering the conceptual space of the play itself. It’s honestly difficult to describe. Leaving the theatre after the final curtain was a lot like waking from a dream.
It's easy enough to pin Happy Days down to one concrete meaning or interpretation, and to judge which themes a given production is giving weight to, and there’s decades of Beckett scholarship to help us do it. But my experience of Schlieper and Rabe’s production sidesteps that rather wonderfully. This is a production that embraces the ambiguity of the text, and in doing so offers a rarer pleasure – the feeling that you’re engaging with the work’s ideas, its very creative fabric, directly. (I’m not sure how you translate that into a star rating, though, although it’s probably on the high side.)
Rabe and Schlieper have pulled off a neat trick here. They’ve taken a notoriously challenging but nonetheless well-mapped play and managed to make it both inviting and yet mysterious once more. They’ve sacrificed none of Happy Days’ complexity and shading in doing so, but instead remind us that, at its best, theatre can be an act of communion like no other.
Happy Days is playing at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 Theatre, Walsh Bay, until June 15. Find tickets & info over here.
