Happy Days (play)

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Happy Days is a play by Samuel Beckett.

Winnie, the main character, is buried up to her waist in a tall mound of sand. She has a bag full of interesting artifacts, including a comb, a toothbrush, toothpaste, lipstick, a nail file, a parasol and a music box. She also has in her bag a revolver, which she strokes and pats lovingly. The harsh ringing of a bell demarcates waking and sleeping hours. The play begins with the ringing of this bell and Winnie's declaration, "Another heavenly day." Winnie is content with her existence: "Ah well, what matter, that's what I always say, it will have been a happy day after all, another happy day."

Her husband Willie lives in a cave behind her, sunk into the back of mound. Unlike his wife he can still move, albeit by crawling on all fours. During the course of the first act he comes out of his hole to read the newspaper and to masturbate, sitting behind the mound with his back to the audience. Despite Winnie's constant chatter and requests that he speak, he says little to nothing —quotes from a newspaper, affirmations that he can hear her, the word "formication", and the explanation that hogs are "castrated male swine, raised for slaughter."

In the second act, Winnie is now buried up to her neck, with only her head exposed. She continues to speak, but can no longer reach her bag or turn around to see her beloved Willie. She is surprisingly optimistic throughout the play, and indeed her only lament seems to come in the second act when she says to Willie, "Do you know what I dream sometimes? That you'll come 'round and live this side where I can see you. I'd be a different woman." At the conclusion of the play Willie crawls up to her, dressed immaculately. Winnie looks lovingly down at Willie, singing a song from the music box she examined in the first act.

[edit] Interpretations

Winnie's increasingly restricted movement can be interpreted as many things, but is most likely a metaphor for the aging process itself. Throughout the play she distracts herself from her true condition by both consistent denial and through the toys in her bag and conversation with both an imagined listener and Willie (although the amount that the fourth wall is actually broken can be reasonably controlled by the director). While presented with the option of suicide early in the play, it is not one that she seriously considers, or refuses to overtly reference. In Act 1, she notes that she has the gun because Willie begged that she take it from him out of fear that he would use it, and the play concludes by exploring his mentality further. As he attempts and fails to mount her mound (an overt sexual reference, and one of several throughout the show that hint at Willie's impotence), it is unclear whether he is attempting to reach her for a kiss or the gun in order to make an end. Because he cannot climb the slope, we are left with the tableau of two characters who are meant for each other trapped in hellish circumstances and unable to escape.

The Plays of Samuel Beckett

Stage Plays: Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Breath, Catastrophe, Come and Go, Eleutheria (posthumous), Endgame, Footfalls, Happy Days, Krapp's Last Tape, Not I, Ohio Impromptu, A Piece of Monologue, Play, Rockaby, Rough for Theatre I, Rough for Theatre II, That Time, Waiting for Godot, What Where Radio Plays: All That Fall, Cascando, Embers, The Old Tune, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Words and Music Television Plays: ...but the clouds..., Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, Nacht und Träume, Quad Screenplays: Film