Happy Days, Arts, London (original) (raw)

Felicity Kendal might be thought a shade too winsome to play Beckett's Winnie. But she acquits herself excellently in Peter Hall's revelatory production, lending the part a genuine emotional reality: instead of a reverent revival about a heroine greeting living entombment with stoical cheer, it becomes a study of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The first shock comes with the revelation of Lucy Hall's set. One is so used to seeing Winnie buried up to her waist in an earthen mound it is disconcerting to find her at the centre of a tilting, scrub-coloured spiral: she seems to be trapped in a serpentine coil rather than earthily incarcerated.

But the image gradually grows on one, allows the whole audience to see the vertically placed Winnie and gets away from the visual monotony that can make every Beckett revival seem very much like the last.

Even more daringly, Kendal emphasises Winnie's panic and fear more than her cheerful fortitude.

She chatters volubly in an Irish accent as if terrified of encroaching silence and of being sundered from her largely unresponsive husband, Willie.

Every day, you feel, becomes a battle to fill out the allotted time between the fiercely ringing bells and to fight against failing words and ailing memory; and it is the certainty of decline and degeneration that gives Kendal's Winnie its tragic quality.

One has admired other Winnies for the sense of despair held jauntily at bay: Kendal, trapped between a fading past and a decelerating future, surrenders to it openly.

Initially bright-eyed as she goes about her daily handbag-emptying rituals, she breaks down in terror as she tries to recall some past golden day only to enquire "That day... What day?"

And when she later seeks to reassure herself that "no one can do nothing" her voice trails off as if she glimpses an endless vista of emptiness.

There are those who see Beckett's play as reductively pessimistic in a world that demands political action. But the eternal verities co-exist with topical issues and Happy Days offers a potent image of our unavailing attempts to beat back the surrounding darkness.

Thanks to Col Farrell's grunting accompaniment as Willie, it also becomes a strangely moving play about marriage as temporary consolation for human solitude.

But the evening belongs to the new-minted Kendal, who poignantly reminds us that Beckett is the poet of terminal stages.

· Until February 14. Box office: 020-7836 3334.