Samuel Beckett’s dark dramedy Happy Days has posed a challenge to theatre companies for more than sixty years. The Beckett estate is much like Beckett was in life; a notoriously tyrannical presence when it comes to revivals, curtailing any attempt to revise his script. But their fastidiousness has also helped create great ingenuity, forcing each iteration to carve out a unique vision with minimal resources and a script simply about a woman – Winnie – stuck in a mound of earth.
In 2009, Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre shrouded their Winnie (Julie Forsyth) in jet-black shrapnel; in 2021, she was entombed by tropical sands blackened with the soot of bushfires at the Old Fitz Theatre. These productions found a way to innovate a show within suffocating confines, like sourcing blood from the very stone swallowing up our leading lady.
While Melbourne Theatre Company’s production shows splashes of technical ingenuity and creativity, there is little evidence of an overarching vision needed to elevate its choices. Directed by Petra Kalive, it seems unsure of what it wants to say about Beckett’s canonical piece or the woman at its heart. Each part struggles to cohere as a result, despite the efforts of our Winnie (the comedian-actress Judith Lucy).
We meet Winnie in the middle of waking up. Woken by a blaring alarm, she stretches up, looks out at us, and cracks a wide smile. Despite being buried up to her waist, she is an unfailing optimist in pearls and a black fascinator, ready to launch into "another happy day"; a phrase she returns to with varying levels of confidence throughout the 95-minute show. Her days are filled watching ants, half-remembering quotes from Psalms to Yeats, and calling out to her stoic husband Willie (Hayden Spencer), buried somewhere in her periphery.
Lucy, a household name in Australian comedy for over twenty years, employs many of the tropes of the stand-up comic for her iteration of Winnie. In her hands, Beckett’s script seems divvied up into various punchlines – an approach that sometimes simplifies the less immediate payoff of his witticisms – delivered with ready winks to a knowing audience. It’s charming, but it feels too much as if Lucy wants to laugh with us; her delivery teasingly reaching behind the fourth wall to goad us on. Winnie’s isolation is hard to accept if she seems to be knowingly playing at being stuck just to make her audience laugh. There’s plenty of Lucy’s signature levity and sardonic charisma here, but her segues often come at the expense of the existential stakes that thrum under Winnie’s tongue-in-cheek idealism.
The show’s second half – though there is curiously no intermission in this production – gives Lucy more to work with. Now just a head popping out of the mound, she stretches the natural elasticity of her face with precision and restraint. Where previously her hammy anachronisms obscured the depths of her character, now they seem powerfully contained and intentional. Something haunts her, and her wide smile quivers at the edges. When she calls to Willie, Lucy’s voice resounds with thinly-veiled anger. While a thankless role, Spencer lends Willie a natural gravitas that complements Winnie’s frenetic anger perfectly. Rare moments of repartee between the pair give them both the opportunity to flex their talents for comedic timing.
Eugyeene Teh’s set is a bleached desert landscape of cracked earth, spotted with tufts of dead wild grass. Though impressive in scale, its colour scheme is oddly muted. Meanwhile, a single cloud moves across a barren landscape on a screen at the back of the stage, a symbol of time passing that unhelpfully reminds us of the show’s sluggish pacing. It’s an effect compounded by Paul Lim’s lighting design that dims with an unbearable slowness as if replicating the approaching sunset. For audiences new to Beckett’s plotless writing, these naturalistic choices will likely only provoke impatience rather than offer a way to resolve it.
Teh’s costume design, on the other hand, is ingeniously playful and exaggerated. Winnie’s black vinyl corset is the perfect oddity. And Willie’s return at the play’s end dressed like a caricature of the monopoly man, with a sky-high top hat and kilometre-long suit tail trailing behind him, is a perfectly absurd combination of Dr. Seuss and Studio Ghibli. But these are isolated moments that do not cohere around any clear overarching vision.
Meaning should never be the yardstick by which one evaluates a Beckett production but there must be a logic to a production’s choices. The best Beckett productions work like poetry, each element dense with meaning – or, at times, meaninglessness. They can be disparate or disconnected, but something has to come from the disconnection. An effect has to accumulate over time. Here, the meaning seems thinned out by production rather than deepened by it. The pale mound encasing Winnie boasts a different aesthetic to the landscape-style backdrop looming backstage. Possible symbols – a slow-moving cloud, Australian-wild grass or an umbrella with an ostrich-head handle – are evocative but disconnected.
"What’s the idea?... What does it mean?" Winnie asks in a moment of tongue-in-cheek metatheatre near the end of the show’s first act. The line is Beckett effectively poking fun at his audiences’ fruitless search for meaning in his absurdism. But beneath the irony, it’s a question each production needs to ask itself in earnest. Despite occasionally inspired moments, this iteration of Beckett’s canonical piece seems frustratingly uninterested in asking more of his play.