Theatre: Up to their necks in happiness

Theatre: Happy Days

Battersea Arts Centre, London

BAC seems to have set itself up as a remedial centre for theatre journalists who fancy moonlighting on the "creative" side of the divide. Last year, there was the publicity stunt of a season where critics directed and directors criticised the result. Now the venue becomes home for the first venture of Leap of Faith productions, in which the Arts Editor of The Guardian has a strong interest. It cannot be long now before BAC invite our own dear Arts Editor to perform the one-man show we can be certain would leave Maureen Lipman's for dead.

To debut with Beckett's Happy Days could have been more of a lemming leap than a Leap of Faith. Admittedly, with a heroine who is stuck first up to her waist and then up to her neck in sandy earth, it's a work that does not present a director (here, Caroline Smith) with many blocking problems. But in most other respects, this play about a woman who ceaselessly rabbits away in an effort to ward off fear and despair, is a daunting technical challenge.

Amanda Bellamy - an attractive actress with a wide, curvy mouth, a melodiously bright voice and rather fewer years than most Winnies - is increasingly persuasive as the evening proceeds. At first, I found her delivery a bit too knowing about the heroine's strategies for coping. Bellamy tends to put the tight inverted commas of conscious self-doubt round the word "happy" in phrases such as "Oh, this is going to be another happy day!" which reduces rather than enhances a sense of the pathos that stems from Winnie's prattling stoicism.

Speaking with a maternally chivvying cheerfulness and managing exasperation towards her incommunicative husband Willie (Hugh Kermode), this very English Winnie could have stepped out of the papered-over suburban depression of an Alan Ayckbourn play and into her sandy mound. As Rosaleen Linehan's consummate performance a year ago at the Almeida proved, Irish cadences actually suit the writing best, bringing out the slightly cock-eyed concatenations of the heroine's thought-processes.

None the less, Ms Bellamy comes into her own when the terror grows naked and the screams piercing in the second half, and there's a splendidly ambiguous mix in her expression of the flattered and the fearful when she can't work out whether her husband is reaching lovingly towards her or homicidally towards her revolver.

It's a shame that, in the second half, the set fails to make her look properly stuck. Instead, she appears to be wearing a neckbrace of sandstone that could detach from the mound like a jigsaw piece, making you think of someone supposedly trapped in a cell who has never thought to check if the door is truly locked.

Booking: 0171-223 2223

Paul Taylor