Happy Days actress is up to her neck in it

SMALL PRINT:WHEN CLARA Simpson sticks her head out of a mound of sand in Corn Exchange's new production of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, she will be adding to a family legacy. Her father, Alan Simpson, was the director of Dublin's experimental Pike Theatre and he first brought Beckett's stage work to Ireland in the 1950s.

“There wasn’t the shock and baffled despair there was elsewhere,” she says, “although there was this big confab between my dad and Beckett, because dad wanted to change the first line from ‘nothing to be done’, to ‘nothing doing’.”

Simpson’s father directed many Beckett plays and wrote a book about him. As a result, she says, the work “never seemed like the big, scary, anguished, abstract thing it is often represented as. His work always seemed very human for me”.

Simpson's first Beckett role was Lucky in a school production of Waiting for Godot, directed by Gerry Stembridge, when she was 14.

After leaving school in the 1970s, she went to Paris. Her mother, the actress Eileen Colgan, wrote her a letter of introduction to Beckett, but she was too foolish and proud to use it, she says. “One of the reasons I left Dublin was because everyone knew who my parents were, I didn’t want to go under those auspices . . . what would we have said to each other?” she says.

Simpson has performed Beckett's work in French and English, taking roles in Footfalls, and Come and Goopposite her mother in a special a production at the Theatre Nationale Populaire.

Having read Happy Daysin French just before taking the part of Winnie, she is fascinated by the different meanings the language accrues in translation. "They are the same play, and yet they are so very different when the sounds change. Oh les beaux jours," she says in perfect French. "Winnie really is the gentlest of Beckett's characters."

Happy Daysruns at the Project Arts Centre from November 4th to the 20th.

– Sara Keating