128 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES too from the rigour of Calvinist electionism, and camp rather than homoerotic. Sean Lawlor DOI: 10.3366/E0309520709000491 Happy Days, directed by Michael Kantor, Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, Australia. Cast: Julie Forsyth as Winnie, Peter Carroll as Willie, Malthouse Theatre Company, Melbourne, Sydney. Season: 6 November to 16 December 2009. Michael Kantor directs this new production of Happy Days; one of a significant number of Beckett s plays performed in Australia in the last six years. This production was organised and financed by the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, and toured to Sydney for a six week run. Kantor s Happy Days presents Beckett s work in a somewhat hallucinogenic form. The set, designed by Anna Cordingley is immediately striking. Shrouded by a turquoise curtain, Winnie s mound, described by Beckett as requiring a [m]aximum of simplicity and symmetry does not immediately suggest these attributes. The mound is constructed of wood, a bare skeleton frame, over which are placed a number of black plywood shards, signifying the scorched rock that holds Winnie. The mound is encircled and covered by rubble, suggesting the creeping burial we have come to expect. Perhaps the main strength of the production is Julie Forsyth as Winnie, who is enjoyable to watch, and brings a strong sense of precision to her performance. Beckett s repetitious dialogue is given a comedic edge through Forsyth s ability to present the same facial and vocal expression for a repeated phrase each time it is used, a feat that suggests extensive and exhaustive rehearsal. She manages to develop a broad range of expression despite the obvious bounds of the character, especially in the second act. Forsyth seems to have built her interpretation of Winnie around the repetition of the phrase the old style : the combination of wistfulness and memory that this phrase evokes anchors the play
Figure 1. Winnie and Willie. Photo Jeff Busby. Production Reviews 129
130 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES Figure 2. Winnie. Photo Jeff Busby.
Production Reviews 131 Figure 3. Winnie and Willie. Photo Jeff Busby. as a whole. Of course, Happy Days is, at least in part, a rumination upon nostalgia, but Forsyth harnesses this very effectively. Rather than emphasising the stoicism of Winnie this production questions her impulse, and that of society in general, back towards nostalgia. Kantor seems to question our need for nostalgia in underlining how looking to the past is futile when every day is ostensibly the same. The growing sense of hysteria that runs through Winnie, especially in the second act, seems to solidify the importance of this issue. Once again, this is not at odds with the text of the play itself, but is nonetheless well communicated. Peter Carroll s Willie provides an effective comic foil for Forsyth s Winnie. In reviews of Happy Days it is usual to comment on how demanding the role of Winnie is. Of course, I agree with this, but I was also impressed by how forcefully Carroll s delivery communicates the character of Willie. The strength of his acting means that, in a piece in which this role is often very much secondary, the audience was always conscious of Willie. Carroll also generated most of the laughs for the evening. Indeed, while some found the play too gruelling to remain for both acts, the grim humour in Happy Days seemed to work well for an Australian audience.
132 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES Michael Kantor s direction clearly expresses a set of ideas, though these are not always those that Kantor himself emphasises in his production notes. I felt that Kantor s production embraces the multiple ambiguities within Happy Days, in creating an interpretation that emphasises both the particular humanity of Winnie and Willie, and the universality of their positions. I must admit then, that the words of the director in the program struck me as somewhat disingenuous. Kantor writes: [t]he evident prescient parallels of climate disaster and late capitalism s teetering hardly need to be mentioned. This phrase troubled me when I attempted to square it with the experience I had in viewing this production that the very strength of the production was its openness to possible interpretations, rather than pointing us towards one specific, and possibly simplistic, interpretation. This may simply be a case of the director feeling some pressure to justify the performance of a play that offers no specific contextual analysis, but I feel that Kantor s comments may lead interpretations of his production of Happy Days towards less fertile ground. While Kantor s note possibly endeavours to facilitate a reading which suggests the relevance of Happy Days to a contemporary audience, for me it runs the risk of obscuring the actual power of both the play and this particular production: both are powerful precisely because, while thinking in detail about the nature of time, they do not attempt to situate the events of the play within time. What is in part most interesting about Happy Days, and Beckett s theatrical oeuvre as a whole, is that they are in many ways stripped of context. Indeed, as Paul Jackson observes in the design notes, Happy Days attempts to achieve a timelessness. Communicating this power, however, remains difficult, and trying to sell the play as a meditation on global warming might indeed have proved counter-productive: the audience thinned in the second act. The audience s patience may be stretched to breaking point by what is, in many ways, and deliberately, a difficult play to watch. I might be overstating the importance of program notes, which many would not read until after the production if at all, but one might argue that suggesting to the audience that they should attend to the timelessness of the play, rather than seeing a prophetic evocation of a modern day context, may have been more conducive to
Production Reviews 133 orienting audience expectations. Kantor s argument for a modern interpretation of the play is also at odds with Forsyth s ironic emphasis of the past: I would argue that Happy Days is best received when the audience believes that the production is somehow outside time. Indeed, Kantor arrives at a more convincing analysis of Happy Days at the conclusion of his note when he states his desire to let the luminous simplicity of Beckett s masterpiece shine through. I believe that to propose a contextual reading of the play is to take away, at least in part, the simplicity of this piece. Russel Goldsmith s sound design is impressive. The amplification of Winnie and Willie was achieved seamlessly, and added significantly to the production as the amplified dialogue at times felt disembodied, as if there was a disconnection between the speech on stage and what we were hearing in the audience. There were hints of music, generally small strains that were difficult to hear indeed, I may have been imagining them completely! The bells for wake and sleep were incredibly jarring. The shock on both Forsyth s face and within the audience was genuine. Paul Jackson s lighting was equally well conceived. His use of shadow using wide-set lights to throw shadow onto the side walls of the theatre was an impressive idea that contributed further to the sense of disembodiment produced by the sound design. Finally, the colours used throughout this production are an interesting addition: Cordingley describes the back curtain which is her interpretation of the trompe-l oeil backcloth as Valium blue, a soothing colour that reflects Winnie s desire to be carried into the sky, and one that works especially well in its counterpoint with Winnie s pink dress in the first act. All in all, then, Kantor s production of Happy Days is impressive. With the Belvoir St Theatre planning another Beckett production in their 2010 season (Eamon Flack directing Robert Menzies in The End) it seems that the interest Beckett s work holds for the theatre life of Australia remains strong. James Gourley DOI: 10.3366/E0309520709000508