Beckett’s trapped housewife is a heroine for our times
Winnie’s opening speech in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961)
Amiddle-aged woman confined above the waist, then up to her neck, in a mound surrounded by scorched grass, first fishing in a shopping bag for her personal effects, later chattering, immobile, amid the blasted landscape, under the blazing “zenith”, her taciturn husband out of reach. Is there a more striking image in post-war drama than the godforsaken Winnie, lockdown heroine of Happy Days?
Samuel Beckett’s plays teem with encapsulations of the human condition that have a searing, shocking power, lightning-rods for flashes of existential truth. For all the writerly finesse of Waiting for Godot – the play that made his name – it’s the simple vision of stasis embodied by Vladimir and Estragon that relays its deep understanding of how we rub along and scrape by.
Beckett understood that showing less could say much more – every word, every syllable, every breath mattered; every prop, every stitch of garment counted. Godot and what followed from him entailed a revolutionary act of decluttering. As the playwright Ronald Harwood later asserted, it “helped to change not just the face of theatre, but also its heart and soul. It blew fresh air into the theatre.”
Arguably it’s Happy Days – which received its UK premiere at the Royal Court in 1962 – that represented the gusty apotheosis of Beckett’s austere artistry. As well as every prattling utterance being minutely calibrated, the mise-en-scène speaks volumes. Winnie, entombed yet enduring, is at one level a contemporary everywoman – holding on to decorum, the trappings of consumerism and the vestiges of memories in an improvised ritual of selfhood, getting through the days in an atomic age that could wipe out mankind. Yet she’s even more abstract and theatrical than that: the emblem of all quotidian life dwarfed by the eternal.
Billie Whitelaw, one of Beckett’s foremost interpreters, told me years ago that she found Happy Days “a nightmare”. She wasn’t referring only to the hellscape of Beckett’s imagination. It was also the business of memorising the play’s umpteen staccato phrases, innumerable little actions, and executing it to the author’s exacting standards.
When she performed it at the Court in 1979, the strain was so great – and Beckett so demanding – that he was politely asked to leave rehearsals. In 1961, The New Yorker hailed it as “the longest and most complex part ever written for a woman”. Peggy Ashcroft, who played it in 1975 at the Old Vic, described it as a “summit” part “that actresses will want to play in the way that actors aim at Hamlet”; and so they have, round and round it comes, its challenge never abating, its potency undiminishing.
The context
Beckett’s stage directions are fiendishly precise. His biographer James Knowlson suggests that “Winnie’s movements are so complicated that… he must have acted out every single one, using his own spectacles and toothbrush and borrowing one of [his wife] Suzanne’s bags, her lipstick and her make-up mirror”. There’s no room to include Winnie’s actions in the precis below, but the scene-setting description gives you the outline.
Winnie, “about fifty, well-preserved, blonde for preference, plump, arms and shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom, pearl necklace” is discovered sleeping in the mound (husband Willie lies nearby, hidden by it). “Long pause. A bell rings piercingly, say ten seconds, stops. She does not move. Pause. Bell more piercingly, say five seconds. She wakes. Bell stops. She raises her head, gazes front. Long pause…
What’s in the speech?
“Another heavenly day” she begins, before uttering an inaudible prayer. Then she commands herself into action: “Begin, Winnie. [Pause.] Begin your day, Winnie.”
Rummaging in her bag, she produces a toothbrush, brushes her teeth with much palaver, then hails Willie, meeting his dead-to-the-world inertia with sympathetic remarks (“can’t be helped”). She inspects her teeth in a mirror: “no better, no worse … no change … no pain …” Struggling to read the toothbrush label (“blind next”), she quotes Hamlet (“woe woe is me”), repeats her “Hoo-oo!” to Willie, offering thanks for her lot: “can’t complain… no no… mustn’t complain”. And on it goes, past trouble with her parasol, more one-sided chatter, the kissing of a revolver and swigging of a medicine bottle, doing her lipstick. The bald pate of Willie emerges: “Oh this is going to be another happy day!”
Why is it so powerful?
While it’s the entire script that delivers the dramatic goods, the opening aria is a high-impact instant invitation to laughter, incredulity, admiration and dread recognition. Here are the universal mechanics of getting going in the day translated into an elaborate performance. Winnie, the essence of the trapped housewife, is like a music-hall turn who can’t move, putting on a show for her own consolation, staving off the comfortless silence with her mechanical-maniacal repartee. We warm to her and pity her even as she teeters on being grotesque.
In performance
Beckett’s production with Whitelaw played on her allure. At the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1993, Prunella Scales made Winnie a middle-class, genteel and Northern creature. At the National in 2007, Fiona Shaw lent an appropriate Irish lilt and impish irony to the role. Unbeaten this past decade in my view, though, is Juliet Stevenson (Young Vic, 2014) giving us a daffy, upright Home Counties busy-bee.
Why it matters now
The play emerged from the ruins of the Second World War, dwelt under the lowering sky of the Cold War and was imbued with the prospect of human self-extinction. Female fortitude (and frustration) is as much a feature of the social landscape now as then. In the meantime, climate change has made the sense of impending apocalypse and our species’ futility more pertinent. And of course, the groundhog days of Covid-curtailed existences plus freak good weather has found its perfect dramatic correlative in Winnie’s empty-sounding rounds of “another heavenly day” and her sunny resolve, as falsely bright as a fluorescent light illuminating a torture-cell.