Happy Days, Riverside Studios review: Lisa Dwan is buried alive in Beckett’s masterpiece

Happy Days is the greatest show on earth – and under it, too. The sight of a middle-aged woman progressively entombed in scorched earth – up to the waist before the interval, up to the neck thereafter – has never lost its capacity to startle. And it never will.

Between the bell for waking and the bell for sleep, Winnie, the protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s hilaro-devastating stage masterpiece from 1961, prattles away in broad Irish (Beckett wrote it in French too – the jokes, to my ear, are less funny in that language). She is attempting to stave off the despair, hysteria, and rising panic she feels as the implications of her plight (pun incoming) gradually sink in. It is, like all Beckett’s stage work, a droll metaphor for theatre as an activity. The stage offers a symbol that is inexhaustibly elusive and ineffable – despite the play being about the exhaustibility of the planet’s resources. Happy Days now looks to have an overt green agenda, as do all Beckett’s post-apocalyptic imaginings (eg Endgame).

Trevor Nunn’s beautiful, deeply considered 60th-anniversary production offers a shock to the system in new and unforeseen ways. It stars Lisa Dwan, who, in the course of several years’ stringent (not to say nutty) devotion to Beckett’s genius, has turned herself into the prima donna assoluta of this branch of the interpretative arts.

Peter Hall, who directed Peggy Ashcroft as Winnie when the play made its debut at the National Theatre, suggested that “Beckett’s theatre is as much about mime and physical precision as it is about words”. That’s true – it’s just that the words happen to constitute a summit of verbal achievement.

Lisa Dwan is not a tentative Winnie. She dominates from her tight spot, arms impatiently fluttering. Her bag of dwindling resources is a fetish which she strokes for reassurance, touching with an erotic shudder on the, erm, revolver. She stares into the abyss at the thought that her words themselves are a resource that might fail.

As a piece of visual art (Robert Jones) and sound design (Johnny Edwards), the production makes a huge impact. We look at Winnie and the taciturn, unhelpful, mostly unseen Willie (Simon Wolfe) through a letterbox-like aperture. The shock after the interval is that Winnie’s head now resembles one of those trophy heads around Marlon Brando’s stockade in Apocalypse Now.

Her hair hangs lustreless and lank, having evidently not seen shampoo or conditioner in quite a while. The air reverberates with a kind of echoic emptiness, emphasising how marriages and friendship tend to be seen as a double act in Beckett, and that Winnie, believing Willie to have died, feels the loneliness with particular cruelty.

It ends – ah, but that would be telling. I will say that it resonantly communicates the ambivalence and ambiguity of their relationship. In their very different ways, Happy Days and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (which hit the scene in 1961 and 1962 respectively) are about women who have to work overtime simply in order to get their inadequate husbands to look at them. Winnie’s disgust at Willie’s little tendencies, such as eating his own snot, manages to be doting as well as shriekingly scandalised. It emasculates by infantilising. Yet there is genuine tenderness.

A work of towering genius. On that point, I refuse (ahem) to be budged.