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Happy Days

Lyttelton (National Theatre), West End
From: Thursday, 18th January 2007
To: Thursday, 1 March 2007

Our Review: Your Reviews:

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Synopsis

Talkative housewife Winnie, and her husband Willie, spend their days together under the blazing sun. Winnie talks, prays and sings her way through life with nothing but a bell for waking and a bell for sleep.

Our Review:

25 January 2007

Samuel Beckett�s austere existential vision of the loneliness of the individual facing the inevitable - death - has become familiar. Not cosy exactly, but familiar. The humour was always there, of course: the human condition is farce as well as tragedy, after all, and survival requires a reliance on routine in the face of unknown terrors.

But familiarity has taken away the edge and put more emphasis on the performance of Winnie. The play has, in spite of itself, become a star vehicle - and Fiona Shaw is undoubtedly a star; intelligent, larger-than-life and articulate, she has enthusiastically analysed her approach to Winnie and this difficult text in newspapers and on the radio.

It is Shaw�s evening, but her extraordinary performance is the result of collaboration with director Deborah Warner, with whom she has worked on a number of projects at the National and a previous Beckett - Footfalls - over which the pair fell out with the Beckett Estate. This time ...

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