Maxine Peake brings a dash of music hall to Beckett’s heroine
Theatre Happy Days Manchester Royal Exchange
Samuel Beckett was so demanding in the build-up to the London premiere of Happy Days
(1961), driving his leading lady – Brenda Bruce – into tearful paroxysms of self-doubt, that he was banished from rehearsals. He would sigh whenever a mistake was made and even brought in a metronome to indicate the intended rhythm.
Watching Maxine Peake brave the daunting, hyper-constraining role of Winnie, which requires the actress to be buried in a mound (first up to her waist, then up to her neck) and chatter on, very precisely, ad nauseam, I realised I was suffering a mild case of Beckett-itis, where you understand the perfectionist author’s wishes and feel compelled to sigh inwardly at every imagined deviation from the ideal reading.
But there’s no definitive interpretation. Each must bring their own frailties, and flavour, to the table. Or in this case, perhaps turntable is the operative
word. In a bold decision, designer Naomi Dawson (and director Sarah Frankcom) have placed the relatively youthful Peake at the summit of a semi-grassy, semi-earthy hillock, edged with eco-nightmare detritus and an oil spill, which slow-spins at the centre of the auditorium.
In the first half, the surrounding lighting gains in ferocity as this piece of human flesh, dolled up in Fifties-style Home Counties finery rotates, like some existential spit-roast, thoughts of past, present and future revolving together. In the second half, with bright flashes and buzzers depriving the buried-alive, now-dishevelled heroine of
sleep, she can’t even twist: her handbag, emblem of groundhog days of routine, is near but out of reach. There’s no escape, no sanctuary, just a dying defiance. Is there too much colour, too much playing-tothe-gallery gaiety at the start?
My assumption was that Winnie is at once talking to herself, in the way that wives shackled to noncommunicative husbands (David Crellin’s Willie, grunting and grubbing at the base of the tumulus) do, while ironically floating her words up to some nonexistent deity. Here there’s a touch of music-hall show-woman-ship to Winnie’s prattle, Peake enlisting us in her lofty repartee, slightly imperilling its loneliness.
On balance, though, and particularly after the interval, that’s fine. Peake has a winning gift for flashing a smile then letting it tremble away and with a secreted camera magnifying every tiny facial movement – relayed on a bank of screens – the increasing pity and terror of Winnie’s entombing predicament hits powerfully home. The brief, agonised screams she lets out are enough to haunt your dreams.