This isn't to say that Stevenson doesn't shine. She clearly relishes the role of Winnie in Beckett's intriguing rumination on the fragility of human existence and coexistence. In a patterned summer frock that suggests a robust vitality, Winnie's daily routine is to extract and examine the gewgaws of everyday life from a large black handbag: a parasol, a mirror, a music box, a gun... In each she finds a trace of a memory, of Happy Days. Unable to dig her way out of the sand - either the sands of time, or a metaphor for emotional inability or physical disability - she continually calls for, and to, her husband Willie. Willie, sunburnt and taciturn, is living in a hole a few yards away. She strains to see him, to hear him, to have him validate her existence with the tiniest of gestures.
In the second half of Happy Days my interval wish came true. Stevenson is up to her neck in sand. All we see is a head - an animated death mask with a line for a mouth and a little voice somewhere in the back of her throat that indicates the passing of both time and hope. Without Willie, who has died or disappeared, Winnie is marking time. As the lonely life she lives in her head draws to an end, she is given respite, a whisper from a happy day: a wheezing vision of Willie in his wedding finery.
In conclusion: Happy Days has a flexible format over which we can lay any number of narratives - is it a rumination on marriage, habit and the psyche, or love, senility and death? Natalie Abrahami's production looks great and if you love Beckett you'll love Stevenson in both halves. If you don't know Beckett, hang on for End Game or Waiting for Godot.
References
Happy Days, Young Vic, Tickets
Nice review, good reflection on the meaning of the show. I was confused by Willie's costume in the last scene ... Americans don't wear top hats to weddings, so I thought he was going to the races! I felt like it seemed much less Everyman and very specifically British, which I thought diluted the impact of the show ...And you?
ReplyDeleteNot so sure it was specifically British so much as a particular type of English, and that's my problem with Stevenson, in my view she never steps outside herself, she simply adapts herself... She was much better in the second half I thought. The point about costume is interesting because that too reflects a particular type of Englishness. It was not Everyman as you elegantly put it, it was... Islington:( That said, people loved it, and it's a good production so one parks reservations.
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