Trevor Nunn on Happy Days: ‘I can vouch for Beckett’s “funny bones”’

The great theatre director on why staging the playwright’s 1961 masterpiece is perfectly suited to a post-plague time

Nunn in 2020 (Tim P Whitby/Getty Images)

At a time when we are yearning for the dawn to arrive, marking the end of a long and very dark night, we may well find that most of our soon-to-be reopening theatres will be treating us to a diet of carefree, frivolous comedies – keeping seriousness at the furthest possible distance. That would be entirely understandable, but we all know that strict diets can give us too much of the same thing, and that variety has always been the spice of theatrical life.

It’s quite likely that William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet to open as theatres came back to life after the plague had closed down London for a year… a play without exactly a happy ending.

The play I am about to open, at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, is called Happy Days. To anybody who doesn’t know this play, it must seem to have the perfect title for this hopeful moment. But of course in the titles of many of the plays of Samuel Beckett, there is a degree of irony. A frivolous comedy it’s not.

Suffice to say that the play is about Winnie, a woman of middle age, who finds herself trapped in the earth, up to her waist. Close by, but largely hidden from her view and ours, is her husband, Willie. In this metaphorical situation, Winnie reflects on her life, and on her marriage, recovering the memory of many happy days long gone. She finds in herself a stalwart determination to go on, looking on the bright side.

But to say more (bearing in mind those who don’t know the play and who, hopefully, will be coming to see it for the first time) would give the game away.

The central, dominant role in the play has been performed by many brilliant and courageous female actors since it was first unveiled in 1961. I was privileged to see the great Dame Peggy Ashcroft play Winnie, directed by the great Peter Hall – the man who first presented Waiting for Godot to an entirely unsuspecting world.

At Riverside Studios, where Beckett himself rehearsed a version of Godot, the interpreter of Winnie in my forthcoming production is an enormously experienced Beckettian. She is Lisa Dwan. Lisa lectures on Beckett, teaches Beckett at Columbia and MIT, and has played in Beckett plays over many years and in many countries, including her native Ireland, and the UK and the US. It’s exhilarating to be in the room with somebody so knowledgeable about both the writer and his work.

Beckett, who began his literary career as a factotum to the great James Joyce, was understandably drawn to the notion of “a stream of consciousness” – the capturing of our continuous unpunctuated flow of thought. The character of Winnie shares her innermost thoughts with us in this way, but in a form similar to the dramatic concept mastered for all time by Shakespeare – the soliloquy; when his characters are completely alone, they can share their private imaginings with the audience, who are both there and not there.

Lisa Dwan in rehearsal for ‘Happy Days’ (Helen Maybanks)

The mention of the Shakespeare soliloquy is also a powerful reminder that Beckett too writes dramatic poetry, in precisely rhythmically defined language that is heightened, and yet entirely real, at one and the same time.

Beckett expects his audience to be alert to every verbal echo, every cross-reference, every choice of word that defines the inner life of a character. In Happy Days, Winnie reveals (only if we are listening closely) that her education has provided her with many inspiring quotations, to which she refers but which she rarely fully remembers. In Elizabethan theatre, it was commonplace for audiences to be invited to “hear” a play, rather than the term that we have grown accustomed to, that we go to “see” a play. In the case of Beckett, and very especially of Happy Days, it’s important that we go to hear this play.

Beyond any question, when Beckett wrote in English (though sometimes he wrote his plays first in French), he is expecting and indeed relying on the rhythms and the melodic line of Irish speech. The colloquialisms and cadences of Irish phraseology abound in this play, and are integral to the play’s humour.

Yes, humour. Beckett had an extraordinary ear for comedic language, and perhaps even more important, for comic timing. Having previously directed Beckett’s All That Fall, Krapp’s Last Tape, Eh Joe and The Old Tune, I can vouch for his “funny bones”. So too in Happy Days, laughter is entirely permissible, in this metaphoric work about the meaning of life and the inevitability of death.

But I would go further. I was once, generations ago, at a lecture on the subject of Beckett’s oeuvre, and as is frequently the case, questions were then invited from the public. There were few brave enough to raise their hands, but eventually one gentleman challenged the speaker, when somewhat scornfully he said: “Aren’t these Beckett plays all so hopelessly pessimistic?” There was an uncomfortable pause before the lecturer responded: “No … Beckett has the kind of optimism that makes pessimism look like sentimentality.”

So, with those words in mind, I can bring myself to say that Happy Days by Samuel Beckett is a play precisely suited to this very unusual moment in time. But that said, it is equally suited to any and every moment in time.

‘Happy Days’ runs at Riverside Studios from 11 June to 25 July