‘Happy Days’ play demands much of its audience

“A horror play” is how Samuel Beckett publisher and director, John Calder, describes Happy Days which opens at Cork’s Everyman Theatre on February 10 as part of an Irish tour.

Happy Days is the third of Beckett’s comic/tragic full length plays on the human condition, and London-based Calder says it demands a lot of audiences. It’s about a housewife, Winnie (Colette Kelly), who, with her husband, Willie (Oengus MacNamara), is stuck in a barren wilderness.

Winnie, no longer young, is embedded in a mound of earth and is subjected to constant light from which there is no escape. Beckett explained to actress, Brenda Bruce, what was going through his mind as he sat down to write the play. “Well, I thought 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’d 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. And I thought, who would cope with that and go down singing, only a woman?”