It is one of the rainiest days in Sydney’s recent history when I find myself, on my way to Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf Theatre, struck by a deluge of rain, the likes of which begged a biblical plague. As I squelch into my seat I can feel myself oozing into the furniture. An hour and forty minutes later, as Samuel Beckett’s modernist masterpiece drew to a close, I can feel the cloying, still damp shirt sticking to me as I applaud.
Samuel Beckett himself couldn’t have asked for better conditions to witness his work.
As the lights dim and total darkness falls, a howling wind overtakes the room, before an ear-splitting bell cleaves the abyss in twain. As light re-emerges, we find ourselves greeted by an elderly female figure, seemingly content, buried up to her waist in a scorched, barren earth. Sat beside her is a long umbrella and a large leather bag.
No context is ever provided for any part of this scene. In a true Brechtian sense, Beckett eschews audience enjoyment. In Happy Days there is no backstory, no context, no happy chance, and certainly no comforting ending. Rather, Beckett transports us into a stagnant purgatory where we ponder upon the faults of modern society.
Pamela Rabe delivers an anguished, heart-wrenching performance of a woman not ready to let go of a world that has passed her by. She exudes a masterful grace, expertly presenting a joyful façade, stuck over a state of existential despair with increasingly cracking plaster.
Minnie, the protagonist, is characterised most strongly through her constant rambling. Her chatter is inherently meaningless. The point of these monologues is not to convey a narrative to the audience; rather, the prattle distracts from the reality of her situation. Questions, phrases, and monologues are repeated again and again. She talks to talk, to hide from the world, and from her own creeping mortality.
At one stage, as Minnie rummages through her bag, she briefly pulls out a Browning revolver and kisses it, before placing it back into the depths of her sack. She brings it out, again and again — Brownie, she calls it. Throughout Happy Days, Minnie returns, again and again, to her beloved gun. Holding it with love, disgust, tender mercy and awe in equal measure, the gun becomes a vessel for Minnie’s exit from this world. A choice between nothingness and death. Rabe communicates this complex relationship with the world around Minnie in expert fashion. Perhaps her greatest feat isn’t conveying the heightened states of ecstasy and despair that are so common in theatre, but in addressing their absence. It is the deft nuances that stress the lack of these great emotions, and the aching weight of their loss, that renders her performance so extraordinary.
As Act Two looms, the wind swirls again, bringing pitch black with it. We return to find Minnie buried up to her neck, almost overcome by the creeping presence of the earth below. Gone is the light, gone is the abyss. Now, she is lit up by a halo, contrasted against the gaping maw. In the light she begins to morph and to change; her face warps, overlaying upon itself in multiple angles, hair to mouth, cheek to eye, skin to bone. As the eye tires at the strain of distinguishing the light from the dark, everything in its glow begins to melt away.
I don’t have enough praise to heap upon the set designers of this miraculous production. An ominous grey mound loomed up off the stage, framed by a convex black border which protrudes out towards the audience like a large TV screen. Behind the destitute hillock, a solid grey concave wall curves to meet the frame offstage in some secret hideaway. It gives the heap the impression of floating in a dull grey void, an endless asphodel. Described in the script as a “Maxim of simplicity and symmetry” it is akin to American artist James Turrell’s ‘Event Horizon’; the background achieves an endless totality. The wall, though we know it to be there, becomes an undefinable space to which there is no return, stretching through infinity into an absolute nothingness.
There is an intricate depth baked into the structure of Happy Days. On the first level, Beckett looks to comment on the banal terror of ageing. Minnie, an old woman, is literally buried into the earth, three-feet under, half-dead already. She performs these banal and repetitive acts, trying to hide away from the anguish that lies lurking in her brain the moment she pauses for thought.
At the same time though, as she states for the umpteenth time, “This is a happy day… for now”, rain is bucketing down hard enough to hear within the soundproofed theatre. In that moment we feel like Minnie, alone in the dark, caught in a state of absolute unrest, the search for joy a feeble attempt to avoid the heart-wrenching drudgeries of reality (or maybe I’m still suffering from my run-in with a hurricane).
Yet, it also goes one step further. In a meta-commentary, Beckett examines the concept of a character in the role of a play. As Minnie ages, she loses track of time, existing in totality beyond the grips of a finite universe. She is caught in an endless loop of her own loss and fear. As much as this acts as a metaphor for the fears of being old and alone, it also engages with the constructs of a character in a play. Minnie only exists as long as Pamela Rabe is there to play her. She has no respite from her torment. One of the most haunting parts of this play is her own self-awareness, the knowledge that all the character has is pain and anguish, incapable of feeling a joy that Beckett doesn’t permit her to possess.
As the play reaches its end, we see, for a final time, Minnie highlighted in infinity, Brownie lying by her side, never used, ever-present. This is the point of aging. At its final hurdle, the gun is never used, no shot is fired. Beckett’s final let-down. No conclusion is ever reached, there is no big bang. We leave the play as we enter it, with a roaring wind and total darkness. This is his lesson: in life, there are no big finales.It is only a series of letdowns, of broken people with shattered dreams, and then a black curtain to send you underground.
Happy Days is not a happy play, but it is, undeniably, a stellar one.
Happy Days played from 5th May to 15th June at the Sydney Theatre Company.
