Happy Days

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

With its central character buried first to her waist and later to her neck in a mound of scorched earth, Happy Daysis not a play you immediately associate with physical theatre. Nor is Samuel Beckett – a writer whose worldview, like his stage directions, is full of impediments and restrictions – a naturally fitting choice for a company as uniquely stylised, subversive and playful as Corn Exchange. For both performer and production, then, this staging is about finding room to maneouvre.

Director Annie Ryan’s co-production with Lyon’s Théâtre National Populaire takes few liberties with the text, but it does bear the mark of a different approach. Joe Vanek’s stark set, a steep canted slab of brown earth, resembles a mudslide under a falling strip of sky. Leaving one corner of exposed stage boards, it remind us, as Beckett does, that we are in a theatre.

Younger than the 50-year-old the text asks for, Clara Simpson’s Winnie is similarly all in the performance. As Beckett’s bright survivor, cheerily talking, singing and daring to hope in spite of insurmountable odds, Simpson delivers precise and constant movements that seem to originate from her core. Some gestures are as simple as a styptic blink, others as expansive as a vigorous flailing of her concealed husband, Willie (a sonorous Andrew Bennett), with her parasol, but all suggest a considered and constant choreography.

The more distracting consequence is that her voice is not freighted with age, giddy intonation, the crack of desperation. Winnie’s speech can seem like a mithered trill, laced with nostalgia (“the old style!”), or persistent optimism (“that is what I find so wonderful”), but here we rarely get the dangerous sense of a woman with a gun in her handbag, that words are an antidote to an otherwise engulfing silence. Here, it’s an act.

Perhaps that’s why Ryan stresses the piece’s metatheatricality: the flung away props that Winnie knows will be there again tomorrow, her teasing sense of being watched, or her recollection of encountering a baffled audience. “What’s it meant to mean?” they ask.

Ryan's programme notes makes one meaning explicit, describing a play about "how to endure the inevitable" in the context of an Irish theatre up to its neck in funding cuts. But Happy Daysitself will not be easily restricted in performance or interpretation, and it's proven in a chillingly rendered second act. Shivering with Denis Clohessy's sound design, where Sinéad Wallace's lights pulse and subside with the insistence of Winnie's waking bell, the play's significance is allowed to grow. In the end, Winnie and Willie simply stare at each other, fixed in a moment of ambiguous silence and menacing physicality. Sometimes, a look can say it all.

Until Nov 20th