Happy Days at Pitlochry Festival Theatre – review

Samuel Beckett is rarely the most cheerful of playwrights. His plays frequently deal with loss, disintegration and, as often as not, the end of the world. Done right, however, they’re uproariously funny too. In that sense, Happy Days is perhaps the play where he is most like himself.

Winnie’s situation is desperate: her resources are running out, she has little reason to hope, and there’s the small matter that she is buried up to her waist – and, after the interval, up to her neck – in sand. Yet she is resolutely upbeat about the future, and it’s from the contrast between Winnie’s internal and external realities that the play derives its power.

Yet sometimes those two realities bleed into one another, and the strength of Siobhán Redmond’s masterly performance as Winnie, in this production at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, is the way she brings out not only the absurdity and the horror of Winnie’s predicament, but the poignancy, the occasional defiance and, above all, the sheer humanity of the character.

Redmond delivers Winnie’s lines with a see-saw vocal cadence that includes a regular falsetto yelp that is both endearing and infuriating. Yet behind that inane delivery lie hints of insecurity and vulnerability. That excessive variation of pitch seems like an attempt to convince herself that her situation “can’t be helped”, but she only occasionally succeeds. When she truly considers what has happened to her, the results frequently cut to the quick.

When she describes herself as having been “caught this way”, you catch your breath at the pitiable simplicity of it, and after the interval, when the sand has reached up to her neck, the pathos of it all becomes desperate, with desolate cries for help mirrored in the aching expressivity of Redmond’s face.

Nevertheless, she remains unbowed throughout, as she harangues Willie and hurls things around the stage, using the rituals of her daily routine to fight against her entrapment. It’s this balance of the formidable and the vulnerable that makes Redmond so compelling to watch, and both Roxana Silbert’s direction and Emma Bailey’s designs create a great frame for the performance, encasing her in a mountain of sand which cascades out of a tear in the sky-blue backdrop, almost like there has been a rift in the universe.

As Willie, Forbes Masson doesn’t have nearly as much to do, of course, and in the first half he is directed somewhat one-dimensionally as a dirty old man; but his final appearance in dapper evening dress underlines his nostalgic affection for his wife, and brings down the curtain with both a tear and a smile.

It looks great in the intimate setting of Pitlochry’s studio theatre, and while the combination of the two great actors in the cleverly designed set makes this a gripping watch, there’s no doubt that it’s Redmond’s show. She’s magnificent, and this Happy Days makes absurdism seem not only approachable but essential. Catch it while you can.