|
|
 |
| |
Beckett still asks
elusive question
HAPPY DAYS
National Theatre Lyttleton
SAMUEL Beckett came to wider public attention when Waiting for Godot opened at the Criterion in 1955.
Bewildered opinion finally took a lead from the brilliant Observer critic Ken Tynan who endorsed it with a rave review.
Beckett, who obeyed few rules, excites curiosity and in his later years was piled up with honours including the Nobel Prize for literature.
And so on to Happy Days, which he wrote in 1960. Vast stages of the Lyttleton looks like a ripped up motorway or a sprawling landfill. Winney (Fiona Shaw) sits like a beached mermaid on top of the heap.
Willey, her husband (Tim Potter) lurks in the resceses of the dump. Occasionally grumbling snorting or reading the Financial Times. For an hour-and-a-half or so. Winney talks and talks, emptying and commenting on the contents of her handbag and anything else that comes into her head.
So what’s it all about? My own conclusion is that it is the emptiness of life and the sterile acres of marriage. Shaw holds the audience and Tom Pyes sets his triumph of organised refuse.
Deborah Warner directs competently. At the end of Winney’s monologue, Willey by the way says virtually nothing, you are left with another unresolved Beckett sermon.
The late and great Peggy Ashcroft played Winney with zeal and enthusiasm in 1975 as did Billie Whitelaw in 1979.
There were only two of our leading actors who set great store by the content of the play. I’m afraid marriage counselling is not the answer to Willey and Winney’s situation.
This is the lost and empty world which Beckett roamed but in spite of the size of the Lyytleton, Fiona Shaw conveys reality and pity and the irritating question “What was it all about?”
But you don’t give up trying to answer the question.
Until March 1
|
 |
Check Prices, Availability & Book Online
Receive Online Discounts and Instant Confirmation |
|
|
|
