Happy Days (play)

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Happy Days is a play in two acts, written in English, by Samuel Beckett. He began the play on 8th October 1960^[1] and it was completed on 14th May 1961.^[2] Beckett finished the translation into French by November 1962 but amended the title. “In a moment of inspiration, he borrowed the title Oh les beaux jours, from Verlaine’s poem, ‘Colloque sentimental’”.^[3]

Cyril Cusack claimed that Happy Days was, by Beckett’s own admission, ‘influenced’ by his wife, Maureen Cusack’s request that he ‘write a happy play’ after Krapp.

The first production was at the Cherry Lane Theatre, New York on 17 September 1961, directed by Alan Schneider with Ruth White as Winnie (for which she won an Obie) and John C. Becher as Willie. The first London production was at the Royal Court Theatre on 1st November 1962 directed by George Devine and Tony Richardson with Brenda Bruce as Winnie and Peter Duguid as Willie.

When Happy Days was first performed in London there were disagreements about every aspect of the text and production. Even Kenneth Tynan, one of the saviours of Godot, felt that Happy Days was "a metaphor extended beyond its capacity",^[4]; nevertheless, he admitted Beckett's strange, insinuating power and urged his readers to buy tickets for the play. The Times critic couldn’t understand why Brenda Bruce played the part with a Scottish accent.

It was first published by Grove Press in 1961 followed by Faber in 1962. By this stage in his writing career Beckett was becoming more aware of the importance of revising his work in actual performance and so wrote to Grove Press about Happy Days on 18 May 1961 to advise them that, "I should prefer the text not to appear in any form before production and not in book form until I have seen some rehearsals in London. I can't be definitive without actual work done in the theatre."^[5]

Contents 1 Background 2 Synopsis 2.1 Act I 2.2 Act II 3 Characters 3.1 Winnie 3.2 Willie 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Background

Beckett was heavily involved with a number of productions. His letters to Alan Schneider make particularly interesting reading – he included a number of diagrams detailing how the mound could be constructed – but it was to Brenda Bruce he confided what was actually going through his mind as he sat down to write the play:

He said: “Well I thought that the most dreadful thing that could happen to anybody, would be not to be allowed to sleep so that just as you’re dropping off there’s be a ‘Dong’ and you’d have to keep awake; you’re sinking into the ground alive and it’s full of ants; and the sun is shining endlessly day and night and there is not a tree … there’s no shade, nothing, and that bell wakes you up all the time and all you’ve got is a little parcel of things to see you through life.” He was talking about a woman’s life, let’s face it. Then he said: “And I thought who would cope with that and go down singing, only a woman.”^[6]

In the play only a single egg-carrying ant – Winnie uses the archaic term emmet – finds its way into the text but it is a source of amusement for both Winnie and Willie when its appearance causes Willie to utter the word “Formication”^[7] though perhaps not for the same reason. Beckett suggests that Willie “is laughing at the image of ants devouring [Winnie] and she at the image of the ants devouring herself.”^[8] Likely its similarity to the word “fornication” is also a factor.

A number of suggestions have been put forth to explain where the idea for the original imagery originated from. ^[9] James Knowlson has suggested images from Luis Buñuel’s 1928 film, Un chien andalou or a photograph by Angus McBean of Frances Day but there is no clear evidence to support either.

It was not the first time Beckett had described a character this way. In his description of Malone in The Unnamable, he writes: “There are no days here, but I use the expression. I see him from the waist up, he stops at the waist.” References to Dante run throughout all Beckett’s writings and Winnie’s situation evokes a particularly forceful image from Inferno, ‘Canto X’. When Virgil and Dante arrive in the sixth circle of Hell they find the condemned forced to lie in open tombs with fire raining down upon them calling to mind the blazing sun that beats down on poor Winnie.

In this particular circle they encounter two Epicureans who are being punished for their belief that the soul dies with the body. The first shade is Farinata. Virgil says, “Look here at Farinata straightening up! / From waist high you will see the whole of him.” (Canto X 31-33) The two discuss Florentine politics until Cavalcante appears in the adjoining grave. Dante writes, “At that there rose before my sight a shade / Beside him — visible down to his chin” (Canto X 52-54) The comparison to Winnie’s state in each of the acts is obvious, however, Cavalcante also recalls Willie, who lies on his back most of the time and is rarely seen. Winnie, like the shades in Hell, also has an unusual perception of time. In his book, Happy Days: Samuel Beckett’s Production Notebook, James Knowlson notes Beckett’s comments during one production of Happy Days, “Winnie could not understand time, for she felt that she existed in a present without end and that the past could have no possible meaning for her.”^[10] For both Dante’s condemned and Winnie, there are no longer days to mark the passage of time, only an eternal present in the hellish heat.

Beckett was particularly keen that there be both a symmetry and an artificiality to the set. A very pompier trompe-l'oeil backcloth (“picture window wall”) was to be used to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance. “What should characterise [the] whole scene, sky and earth,” he wrote, “is a pathetic unsuccessful realism, the kind of tawdriness you get in a 3rd rate musical or pantomime, that quality of pompier, laughably earnest bad imitation.”^[11]

The scene is reminiscent of a seaside postcard ^[12] with Winnie buried in the sand and Willie with his knotted handkerchief and his boater. The fake backdrop calls to mind also the kind used by photographers that feature a painted body on a sheet of wood with a hole cut out where the head belongs popular at holiday venues. Even the title of the play, Happy Days, is the kind of expression typically used when reminiscing about these kinds of holidays. Of note is the fact that he worked on the play while in the English seaside resort of Folkstone during the two weeks he was obliged to be resident in the area before his marriage to Suzanne could officially take place.

In his book, The Beckett Country, Eoin O’Brien reveals a connection between Beckett’s first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Happy Days. There is a description of a woman rummaging through her fathomless bag. The location, O’Brien identifies as a quiet cove known as Jack’s Hole in County Wicklow. That the play might take place in Ireland is also suggested by the fact that Willie is said to have been reading from an Irish Sunday paper.

Beckett experimented with different newspaper headlines before he settled on what appears in print. In the second holograph he included three which are of interest (at this time Willie is still ‘B’):^[13]

Rocket strikes Pomona. Seven hundred thousand missing. (Pause. B turns page.) Rocket strikes – . One female lavatory attendant spared. (Pause. B turns page.) Rocket strikes – . 3 priests survive.

Although excised from the final text it has been suggested that what Beckett was thinking about here was a post-apocalyptic setting and many reviewers describe the setting so.^[14] Similar claims have been made with regards to Endgame and Rough for Theatre I.

[edit] Synopsis

“

Winnie is one of those parts, I believe, that actresses will want to play in the way that actors aim at Hamlet – a 'summit' part. – Dame Peggy Ashcroft[15]

”

[edit] Act I

Winnie, a woman no longer young, is embedded up to her “big bosom”^[16] in a mound of earth, “the Mother Earth symbol to end all other mother earth symbols”.^[17] She lives in a deluge of never-ending light from which there is no escape: even the parasol she unfolds at one point ignites, leaving her without protection. We learn that she has not always been buried in this way but we never discover how she came to be trapped so. Beckett’s dramaturgy – indeed his entire œuvre – takes little interest in causality, e.g. Molloy finds himself ‘buried’ in his mother’s bed, in his mother’s room, realizes he has not always been there but demonstrates no particular curiosity as regards the specifics of how he arrived there.

It is a strange image. “Strangeness,” Beckett informs us, “was the necessary condition of the play – of Winnie’s plight in the play.”^[18] During Berlin rehearsals he said, “In this play you have the combination of the strange and the practical, the mysterious and the factual. This is the crux of both the comedy and the tragedy of it.”^[19]

Winnie passes her time between “the bell for waking and the bell for sleep”^[20] by following a very exact daily routine. In this respect she is reminiscent of the two characters in Act Without Words II. In early drafts Winnie set an alarm clock but Beckett later gave control of the bell to an unexplained external force like that in charge of the goad and the whistle in the two Act Without Words plays. By contrast Winnie, it has to be said, is not short of words, she is, in fact, a compulsive talker.

Winnie begins her day. After the sounding of the transcendental bell, she offers up a half-forgotten prayer and then sets about her daily routine. As she removes the items from her bag – a comb, a toothbrush the writing on which she spends most of the first act trying to decipher, toothpaste, a bottle of patent medicine, lipstick, a nail file, a revolver which she feels the need to quickly kiss and a music box – she prattles away to her husband, Willie who lives in a cave behind the mound. The routine is raised to the level of ceremony. Beckett’s instructions to Billie Whitelaw in 1979 emphasis this:

The bag is all she has – look at it with affection … From the first you should know how she feels about it … When the bag is at the right height you peer in, see what things are there and then get them out. Peer, take, place. Peer, take, place. You peer more when you pick things up than when you put them down. Everything has its place.^[21] Everything is wearing out or running out. At the start of Act I she takes the last swig of her tonic before throwing away the bottle, her toothbrush has hardly any hairs left and the lipstick, to use Beckett’s expression, is “visibly zu ende,” the parasol is faded with a “mangy fringe” and even her pearl necklace is “more thread than pearls”.^[22]

Winnie functions on the ecclesiastical principle that there is a time for everything and the proper time for certain things to take place is in the daytime, ‘day’ being an abstract notion since there is only constant daylight in this place; she would not think of singing her song after the bell for sleep had gone which is why, then she uses the term, she refers to it as “the old style”.

She is the eternal optimist – Robert Brustein called her a “hopeful futilitarian” ^[23] – but the available sources of her optimism are being used up and she has to work harder and harder to keep up her positive front which is already wafer-thin when we first meet her. Beckett has described her a being “like a bird”^[24] and she makes every effort to rise above her predicament but she keeps getting pulled down. She never questions or explains why she finds herself in the predicament she is in – most of us never understand how we wind up in a rut, or stuck in the mud to use similar earthy metaphors – but her dream is that she will “simply float up into the blue … And that perhaps some day the earth will yield and let me go, the pull is so great, yes, crack all round me and let me out.”^[25]

Beckett even pokes fun at his audience through Winnie and her story about Shower/Cooker. Beckett explained this in a letter to Alan Schneider:

Shower (rain). Shower & Cooker are derived from German “schauen” & “kucken” (to look). They represent the onlooker (audience) wanting to know the meaning of things.^[26]

Willie, for his part, ignores her and what responses he does make are terse and often monosyllabic. At the start of the play she even strikes him a couple of times simply to get his attention. His responses are of less importance to Winnie than the fact that he is there to listen. Always in Beckett’s drama there is someone or something to fulfil this critical function whether it is the Auditor in Not I or the interrogatory light in Play. When words fail her she reverts to the contents of her bag to tide her over, at least in Act I she does.

They never have anything that could remotely be described as a conversation. He answers a question concerning the correct term to describe the hair on one’s head, confirms he can still hear her again when she reduces the volume at which she speaks over stages, becoming audibly angrier in the process, finally he defines “hog” for her lavishing a whole two – albeit short – sentences on her in the process. The most we ever see of him is the back of his head whilst he reads his yellowing paper or scrutinises his postcards. Other than that his activities are described by Winnie and involve finding his way in and out of his hole, working Vaseline into his privates and sleeping.

Winnie offers up reminisces from an idealised past, quotes from the classics^[27] in contrast to Willie’s quotes from the popular press, comments on everything flitting from topic to topic, laughs at herself, at Willie and at their predicament. She assures herself: “This will have been another happy day!”^[28] – a recurrent catch phrase throughout the play – when in fact she often seems on the verge of tears. At the end of the day she carefully collects her possessions – bar the gun – and places them back in the bag. The gun, which has somehow always managed to defy the laws of physics ending up on the top of the bag she decides to leave out. Winnie never plumbs (never dares plumb) the bottom ("The depths in particular, who knows what treasures"^[29]), so it is also her hope chest.

The items in her bag also have secondary functions, they serve as aides-mémoire. But more, like Krapp’s tapes or Lucky’s bones they provide her with what Mary Doll describes as “touchstones of existential meaning”.^[30] Winnie’s perception of these objects connects her to the memories of specific days and important incidents within them. While she is able to discuss these incidents in some detail, Winnie cannot hold on to them or place them within a context.

[edit] Act II

“As Act II of Godot is bleaker than Act I, as Maddy’s homeward journey is bleaker than her setting out, Act II of Happy Days is bleaker than Act I, and Winnie knows it: “To have been what I always am – and so changed from what I was.”^[31] By Act II she can no longer imagine any relief, and she can no longer pray, as she did at the play’s start. Although she still intones the phrase ‘happy day’, it no longer triggers her smile.”^[32] Whereas in Godot Beckett explicitly states that Act II takes place on the next day, in Happy Days no such assertion is made. Time has simply passed.

In the first act she uses the items from her bag to trigger memories. In this act, unable to reach into it, she uses the bag itself, along with the parasol which has, as she predicted, reappeared intact, to the same end. We learn that Willie gave her the bag “to go to market”^[33] and the parasol is linked to a memory not too dissimilar to the one that entrances Krapp so, the day out on the punt.

Winnie is however sinking inexorably in the slow sands of time and disappointment. In the second act she has almost been engulfed by the mound; only her head is visible, now she cannot move it and she admits to being in pain. Despite the desperation of her predicament, she is confident that this will be another of her happy days. She continues to chatter, but as can no longer reach her bag or turn around, it takes more of an effort to keep up the front. It has been some time since she has seen or heard from Willie but, since she is unable to see over the back of the mound, she doesn’t even know for sure if he is still there though she needs to believe he is:

I used to think that I would learn to talk alone. (Pause.) By that I mean to myself, the wilderness. (Smile.) But no. (Smile broader.) No no. (Smile off.) Ergo you are there. (Pause.) Oh no doubt you are dead, like the others, no doubt you have died, or gone away and left me, like the others, it doesn’t matter, you are there.^[34]

“In Happy Days the existential condition of the characters is visualized in the mound tightening around Winnie who is sinking deeper and deeper. The nearer she gets to the end, the slower does Winnie sink, and never does the end come to release her from the pain of being smothered in the mound. What Beckett wants to represent is the endless repetition of dying moments rather than death itself. His characters wish to finish life but the end never comes because the clock becomes slower and slower. There is still time, always.”^[35] Not unreasonably Winnie’s mound has been compared to Zeno’s impossible heap.

Zeno’s heap

If a man were to take a bag of millet and tip half of the load and make a heap, and repeat this procedure day after day, then one day it would be completed if one assumes an infinite amount of time to complete the task (in pure math, the idea of the infinite will allow this). However, because man is limited, he will never be able to finish the task. In fact, the nearer the man gets to emptying the bag, the slower the progress is. The heap becomes "the impossible heap." Without its completion, there is no release.

At the conclusion of the play Willie crawls up to her, “dressed to kill” (a pun reserved for readers) and sporting a “Battle of Britain moustache”. Her response is ironic, not ebullient. When Kay Boyle asked Beckett why Willie reaches up towards Winnie, he replied:

The question as to which Willie is ‘after’ – Winnie or the revolver – is like the question in All That Fall as to whether Mr Rooney threw the little girl out of the railway-carriage or not. And the answer is the same in both cases – we don’t know, at least I don’t. All that is necessary as far as I’m concerned – technically and otherwise – less too little, more too much – is the ambiguity of motive, established clearly I hope by Winnie, ‘Is it me you’re after, Willie, or is it something else? Is it a kiss you’re after, Willie, or is it something else?’ and by the conspicuousness of revolver requested in the stage-directions at beginning of Act II. To test the doubt was dramatically a chance not to be missed, not be bungled either by resolving it.”^[36]

Her words to Willie are bitter and unpleasant, and she maintains that tone up to the point he utters his one line in Act II: “Win” at which point she cannot hold back:

Win! (Pause.) Oh this is a happy day, this will have been another happy day! (Pause.) After all. (Pause.) So far.^[37]

The familiar “So far” gives the subtle suggestion of cynicism but it doesn’t stop her bursting into the waltz duet, ‘I love you so’ from The Merry Widow and the play proceeds to its close.

[edit] Characters

[edit] Winnie

Winnie is not only terrified of being alone, but is particularly afraid of speaking unheard, without the possibility of any response. Winnie's raison d'être is to speak; words flow from her in an endless stream as she busies herself with objects from her black bag. She uses “clichés to insulate [herself] from the harshness of existence"^[38] Winnie is comforted only by her mindless rambling, basic objects, and by the idea that someone, Willie, is listening. If she’s talking, which she does relentlessly, she’s not thinking, a common approach to the burden of existence taken by Beckett’s characters. Her logic is flawed. She believes that because she needs someone to be listening to her that someone is there. James Knowlson has described it as a twisted version of Descartes’ famous aphorism: “I think therefore I am” only in Winnie’s case it’s: “I talk therefore you are.”^[39] She is not far away from Henry in Embers who, sitting on his beach, conjures up a wife to talk to. In Beckett’s texts, language conceals the world and insulates the individual from it. This protective barrier is a comfort to Beckett’s characters. As Gontarski notes, “Language generally in Beckett’s world is not a means of conveying meaning, but a balm for the sores of existence.”^[40]

“In the Happy Days of 1979, Beckett very particularly played upon the physical attractiveness of [Billie] Whitelaw … Where most Winnies, such as Peggy Ashcroft and Irene Worth, look rather matronly, Beckett made Whitelaw’s Winnie into a siren, with black, low cut gown, haunting eyes, exaggerated lipstick … a woman, who while not any longer young, still manifests a powerful erotic dimension.”^[41] Her memories often have a sexual edge: sitting on Charlie Hunter’s knees; her first kiss; the two balls; an encounter in a toolshed; when handed the erotic postcard from Willie, she takes time to examine it before returning it in feigned offense and the story she tells of the small girl Mildred’s (Beckett’s original name for Winnie) sexual curiosity is genuinely disturbing. A mouse, in Freudian terms, is a phallic symbol and Beckett’s protagonists often speak autobiographically in the third person. Also the doll wears a pearl necklet, as does she. It should not be taken from this that the terrified child (assuming the story is figurative) has become the frigid wife; she talks knowledgably about sex and early drafts of the play even show how their sex life has dwindled over the years. It does appear that sexual relations between her and Willie – a common British euphemism for penis – have been lacking, at least from her perspective:

There was a time when I could have given you a hand … And then a time before that again when I did give you a hand … You were always in dire need of a hand, Willie.^[42]

Perhaps this is why she teases him with her recollection of other men, to bring him out both sexually and imaginatively. The play is full of sexual innuendo. “And it is sex which is responsible for the contuation of the life that plunges man inevitably into suffering. The sexual innuendos contrast, then, with images of sterility or ‘discreation.’”^[43]

[edit] Willie

In marked contrast to Winnie's loquacity, the henpecked Willie is laconic to a fault. He is without a doubt one of Beckett’s less rewarding parts for an actor. Indeed, in the whole of the second act Willie utters only one, barely audible monosyllabic word. Much of his dialogue consists of him reading notices from his paper; his responses to Winnie – when he can be bothered to respond at all – are terse and barely communicative, Winnie often adding the meaning she feels is lacking herself.

He keeps himself conveniently out of Winnie's gaze, only occasionally surfacing from his tunnel. His only interest now is to bury himself, figuratively, in an old newspaper or erotic picture postcards, or literally, underground in his cave asleep and seemingly unaffected by the bell that jars Winnie. By contrast with Winnie who attempts to keep up appearances,^[44] Willie is common. There is a child-like, if not exactly an innocent, quality to him and there are many times in the play you might think Winnie was talking to a young boy rather than a grown man, a boy who picks his nose and then feels the need to eat the pickings. Winnie also serves as his protector, the custodian of “Brownie” the revolver^[45] she keeps safe from him in case he uses it on himself.

He functions mainly as something for her to talk at – being used as a stooge by the old music hall pro that Winnie is – “just to know that in theory you can hear me though in fact you don't is all I need.”^[46] One is reminded of Hylda Baker, a music hall star from the forties through to the sixties, famous for her catch phrases, who held long one-sided malapropism-driven ‘conversations’ with the ever silent ‘Cynthia’. Willie is the henpecked husband – another music hall stable – not entirely silent perhaps. The nagging wife and the henpecked husband are, of course, archetypes: Burns wrote about them, as did Chaucer, they were a stable of the music hall and the tradition continues to this day in television programmes like Last of the Summer Wine where every episode is built around the premise, and, if Willie is indeed reaching for the gun at the end of the play, this would tie in with the popular plot where such a put-upon husband decides to do away with his wife.

Whereas Beckett aligns Winnie with a bird, albeit one with oil on its feathers, he likens Willie to a “turtle”^[47] which is strange because many of the metaphors in the play associate him with pigs. "[I]n Act I Winnie speaks of envying "the brute beast"^[48] only a moment before Willie's "hairy forearm"^[49] appears above the mound; throughout the play Willie never rises to his feet, but crawls on all fours; and when Winnie notes that the bristles on her toothbrush are "pure ... hog's ... setae,"^[50] Willie gives this comment a sexual dimension by revealing that a hog is a "Castrated male swine."^[51] In context, this phrase seems to relate to Willie, since various hints are made that he has been metaphorically emasculated by his domineering wife."^[52]

The boater Willie sports at a “rakish angle”^[53] places his character clearly in the music hall tradition as does his formal wear in the second half of the play. Historically boaters were fashionable headgear up till about the 1920s at which time sunbathing started to become fashionable; prior to this ladies would commonly be seen making use of parasols to protect their white skin from the sun's harmful rays.

At the end of the play Willie struggles to bring things to an end, to “Win,” while Winnie sings: “It’s true, it’s true, / You love me so!”^[54] When Willie first appears Winnie expresses, however tentatively, some doubts but as soon as he utters the word, “Win,” she allows it to be all the excuse she needs to let, what Beckett calls in Proust, “pernicious and incurable optimism”^[55] overtake her.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Spark Notes
• Page contains a link to an excerpt from the BBC radio production with Geraldine McEwan as Winnie
• Channel 4 notes on the play

v • d • e The plays of Samuel Beckett Stage: 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: All That Fall, Cascando, Embers, The Old Tune, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Words and Music Television: ...but the clouds..., Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, Nacht und Träume, Quad Screen: Film