Happy Days review – a pragmatic rejig (original) (raw)
To fit Samuel Beckett’s 1961 play on to the round stage of the Exchange, Sarah Frankcom and Naomi Dawson have relocated his two characters from a still, empty, arid space where sky meets a distant horizon on to what looks like a giant termite hill, surrounded by water and slowly rotating. Winnie (Maxine Peake) is still buried waist-deep in the summit but Willie – in Beckett’s text, lying behind the mound and only partially visible – is here in plain sight of around a third of the audience at any given moment.
Instead of picturing in our mind’s eye the things Winnie describes the mostly silent Willie doing, we now see him clearly. Do these changes matter? At least partially, yes. Beckett relies on the audience’s active imaginative cooperation to create the world of the play. These changes lessen that aspect of our participation (more so in the second half, when Winnie, now buried up to her neck, talks into a webcam that relays her face in closeup to large screens suspended above the mound). They also make the relationship between Winnie and Willie (David Crellin) less absurdly touching.
Winnie is an extraordinarily demanding role, and Peake brings enormous commitment to it. I would book a ticket today if she said she were going play it again in 10 years’ time. For now, though, she limits, by over-psychologising, this unfathomable speck of humanity asserting existence against infinite space and silence. If Beckett’s play counterpoints earth and spirit, Frankcom’s pragmatic production opts for solid over soaring.
Happy Days is at the Royal Exchange, Manchester until 23 June