Happy Days

Published Thursday 25 January 2007 at 10:35 by Aleks Sierz

What goes around, comes around. In 1976, Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days was staged at the new Lyttelton Theatre. Now this play, which was written in 1960, returns to the same venue in an extraordinary production directed by Deborah Warner and starring Fiona Shaw.

Firstly, it is cause for celebration that Warner and Shaw have made up with the Beckett estate, more than a decade after their radical staging of Footfalls in 1994 so enraged the guardians of his work that its tour was cancelled.

This time, everything about this production is large. Underneath a painting of a desolate desert, Tom Pye’s epic set looks like the ruins of a Middle Eastern bunker. Here, the slightly batty Winnie passes the time trying to convince herself that she will have a happy day, when all around the world decays. In the first half, she’s buried up to the waist, in the second, up to her neck.

You’d expect a bravura performance from Shaw and that’s exactly what you get. Her Winnie starts the day by iconoclastically humming The Archers’ theme while cleaning her teeth, before polishing her glasses on her breasts, and then making rapid switches between twitching panic and an open embrace of life.

Meanwhile Tim Potter, as Willie, exudes an aptly grotty sloth. By the second half, Shaw throws away all trace of her trademark self-irony and hits the right note of blazing intensity, strident, desperate and utterly convincing.

What Warner brings out perfectly is the different texture of the play’s first and second halves, and her superbly intelligent version breathes new life into what is so often a reverentially played but desperately dull classic.