Books You Should Be Reading But Aren't: Happy Days

We’ll start with an easy one. Written by our namesake (with obvious liberties taken), this is, like most Beckett plays, stripped down to bare essentials. There are two characters: Winnie (a woman about fifty) and Willie (a man about sixty). The play was originally written in English (an exception for Beckett—who often wrote in French) and performed at the Cherry Lane Theater in our beloved city, New York, in 1961.

Winnie is buried up to her waist in a mound of dirt in the first act. She is awoken by a bell. She has a black bag in front of her, containing mostly cosmetics. She insists on getting ready for the day, though she knows she is (mostly) alone, clinging to the idea that Willie, her mostly silent, simple companion is there listening to her falsely optimistic, incessant monologue.

“Not that I flatter myself you hear much, no Willie, God forbid. Days perhaps
when you hear nothing. But days too when you answer. So that I may say at all
times, even when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, Something of this
is being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a
thing I could never bear to do—for any length of time. That is what enables me
to go on, go on talking that is. “

She insists, that no matter what else will be left, even if Willie were to leave her, there would be the bag. She pulls a revolver out of the bag, seemingly at random, saying, “You again!” unwittingly pulling her escape from her mound and placing it on the stage, for the audience to contemplate even after Winnie herself has moved on. Even when she gathers her things at the end of the day, she does not place the revolver back in the bag. Winnie does not really even consider suicide as an option. Willie has also given her a parasol earlier in the act, presumably to shield herself from the distressingly hot sun with. She wishes that Willie would let her see him, since she cannot turn around and would come out from his hole (“What a curse, mobility!”). She tells us at the end of act one, “This is a happy day!...Pray your own prayer, Winnie.”

In the second act, she is buried up to her neck, having lost all of her mobility, except the movement of her eyes, which Beckett instructs. She can’t use her parasol anymore, so she is left exposed to the elements (perhaps a reference to the sixth circle of Dante’s Inferno). Also, she cannot use the gun, and so Beckett blatantly violates Chekov’s rule (do not put a gun on stage if you aren’t going to use it) and makes Winnie’s situation seem even more helpless. Willie does not seem concerned about Winnie or the gun, and in fact comes out of his hole dressed in a suit (“dressed to kill”), like he is ready to go somewhere. He comes into her field of vision for the first time in a long while. She nags him about not coming when she cried for him earlier in the act, but all is made better when Willie utters “Win” as his last line of the play, and Winnie exclaims, “Win! Oh this is a happy day, this will have been another happy day! After all. So far.” With one word, Winnie surrenders her previous belief that Willie does not love her and feebly sustains herself on his attention, in spite of her ever more desperate situation. We are left with the questions, “Will Winnie be buried alive? Will Willie stay despite his mobility? Will he shoot Winnie?”

Winnie’s character is grasping at straws, hoping to find something that she can justify her existence with (prayer, blessings, Willie, even a small music box), and she is quickly failing. It is in the last act where even her salvation, suicide, is taken from her by the rising mound. Her only hope is Willie: that he will either stay with her and comfort her, or shoot her. We never see the conclusion of this, heightening the distress of the play.

Watch a clip from the second act, in the film version, here: