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

Trevor Nunn’s beautiful, deeply considered 60th-anniversary production offers a shock to the system in new and unforeseen ways

Lisa Dwan as Winnie in ‘Happy Days’ (Helen Maybanks)

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.