Surrounded by her trinkets – her bag, her toothbrush, her parasol, her revolver – she sits buried up to her waist in a mound of sand, the great symbol of blind optimism battered by the tides of existential despair. Samuel Beckett’s 1961 masterpiece Happy Days bequeathed us Winnie, theatre’s enduring tragic fool, and we’ve been grappling with her meaning ever since. Is she delusional or heroic, myopic or a kind of seer?
On paper, the casting of Judith Lucy as Winnie seems counterintuitive. Lucy’s comedic persona is entirely wrapped up in a self-effacing irony, and irony is a quality Winnie almost certainly lacks. The bone dry wit Lucy has honed all her career – those withering barbs she directs at herself as often as others – feels like the polar opposite of Winnie’s prating cheerfulness. In performance, however, it feels wonderfully cohesive.
The play opens with “the bell”, a hideously jangling cacophony that announces the beginning of Winnie’s day and signals its end – ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for Winnie. What would seem an unbearable predicament to us, her imprisonment in that lifeless mound of sand, is for her a “great mercy”. This disconnect between her attitude and her objective reality is the source of the play’s humour as well as its horror.
