Happy Days (Sheffield)

Lizzie Clachan’s striking design concept, inspired by museum diorama presentation cases, combined with Natasha Chivers’ sensitive lighting design, offer an apparently endless mountainous cyclorama bathed in blinkingly hyper-real sunlight. The initial revelation of this visual is highly effective, my pulse races at the vaudevillian drum roll as the velvet curtains sweep aside to reveal this atmospheric other-world.

Here we meet the unfortunate Winnie, buried to her waist in the ground, living her days on repeat, guided by a bell that dictates when she sleeps and wakes. Winnie has her husband Willie for company, a strong, silent type who we become acquainted with via appearances of the back of his head long before we see his face.

Very little happens in Happy Days, typical of Beckett’s plays. Winnie talks us through the minutia of her daily life, passing the time until the next bell. Willie pipes up from time to time, his interjections a relief to Winnie’s monotony. Their relationship is comically evocative of a couple co-existing in stasis. Peter McGowan’s Willie is skilful, likeable and very much present despite the brevity of his character.

Pauline McLynn’s Winnie is at times reminiscent of her performance as Mrs Doyle in Father Ted, despite assuming a British middle class persona. At other times she reaches beyond superficiality and into the depths of Winnie, I am most interested in these moments and less so in the more literal and obvious comedic business.

During act one some of the longer sections of monologue feel aimless and meaningless beyond the existential aesthetic intended by Beckett, lacking impulse or logic. The result is a disconnect with the audience. Opportunities for Winnie to fully inhabit and relay her experience are missed.

However, the second act hits the spot. Despite now being buried to her neck in earth McLynn finds her way, expressing something hauntingly emotional which begins during the section where she tells the story of Mildred and her dolly and resonates through to the uplifting and touching ending.