Happy Days

I saw the play in New York City, starring Irene Worth, a fine actress, and directed by Andrei Servan, a brilliant director. That was many years ago, but I've never forgotten it. Truly memorable theater.

This video is ruined by the camera person, who, without rhyme or reason moves the camera from one thing to another, goes back and forth from long shots, to closeups, to extreme closeups. Irene Worth is a fine and disciplined actress, but here she mugs for the camera, making faces, rolling her eyes. Sometimes she stares directly into the camera, close up. None of this is appropriate for the play.

The words of the play are all-important, but here they are lost in the visual noise of frenetic camera movements and Irene Worth's mugging. The sound is not good, and it is often hard to understand what she is saying.

Patricia Rozema's production of 'Happy Days' is a profoundly disappointing experience. When I heard the play was going to be filmed as part of the 'Beckett on Film' series I was delighted, since the longer plays are seldom performed where I live, and I have great respect for Ms. Rozema's other work. And I am not one of those Beckett afficionados who rails against 'interpretation' of the plays, since everyone involved in any stage production has a hand in interpreting. However, the power of this play is not in the words, but in the silences. In her comments on her approach, she states that she was after as natural an approach as possible, which apparently requires Rosaleen Linehan to get through her dialog as quickly as possible, disregarding the direction 'pause'. Ms. Linehan spent several weeks buried up to her waist, and later her neck, at the top of a volcano in the Canary Islands to make this film. A bit more 'stagey-ness' and theatricality would have made this a little less dull.

'Happy Days' features one of Beckett's most famous metaphors encapsulated in an extraordinary visual image: a middle-aged woman buried up to her waist in a mound. Although this image is hardly realistic, except in the context of seaside holidays, 'Happy Days' seems to me to be Beckett's most tangible work, the one most rooted in an everyday reality - marriage - rather than something vaguely universal.

Winnie is buried in this mound just as many women find themselves buried in the mound of everyday life, with its oppressive repetitiveness, the need for an inane optimism just to get through the day, terrified you won't have enough to do to fill up that vast chasm. It is a life where mundane things assume hysterically important proportions, because human contact with one's spouse has been reduced to brief grunts and pained silence, where one's husband is so used to married life he no longer cares about concealing objectionable personal habits, living in his own hole, totally wrapped up in himself, his own interests and vanity.

Some people have argued that Winnie is thick and self-deluded in her chirping merriment, her refusal to see reality for what it is - one look at Beckett's text and Rosaline Linehen's performance show only too clearly how self-aware lonely Winnie is, with her sense of failure, of promise unfulfilled, of companionship brutalised by the everyday. Her barren marriage in a barren landscape is linked to the childlessness of the union - 'I cannot conceive': like Hamm and Clov in 'Endgame', they are the last inhabitants of a blasted planet, markers of a dying humanity.

Like 'Play', this is a vision of life - and specifically marriage - as hell on earth. And yet the play, as so often with Beckett, is frequently hilarious, full of puns and doubles entendres, and although Winnie may never win, here response to existence is surely more winning than her husband's.

Patricia Rozema's stylistic restraint may surprise admirers of her masterpiece 'Mansfield Park' - there is no camera movement and very few cuts - creating a sense of inertia and immobility appropriate to Beckett. Although Beckett's play is fundamentally domestic, Rozema extends his metaphor, and sets it in a vast, stony, wind-strewn Tenerife desert, suggesting the endlessness of Winnie's turmoil, and making the work less specific, more universal, in keeping with her general interpretation of Beckett's work, which she sees as genderless. If Rozema's 'theatricality' is more faithful to Beckett, monotony is flirted with, as it should: it's a monotonous life - as spectators we are lucky, we can get up and leave. Poor Winnie's only progress is to be even further buried.