Happy Days (Drama)
Happy Days (English original title: Happy Days ; French title: Oh les beaux jours ) is a play by Samuel Beckett from 1960 . The first performance of the two-act took place on September 17, 1961 in New York in the Cherry Lane Theater. Winnie played Ruth White . Directed by Alan Schneider , who the following year also Edward Albee's thematically related successful play Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf? staged.
While the New York performance brought it to over a hundred repetitions, the critics reacted rather helplessly two weeks later to the German premiere (September 30, 1961) in the workshop of the Berlin Schiller Theater. Nevertheless, the production, directed by Walter Henn, was not a failure thanks to the acting performance of Berta Drews in the leading role.
Today, along with Waiting for Godot and the Endgame , Happy Days is one of Beckett's most played pieces.
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In the first act, Winnie, "an approximately 50-year-old, well-preserved blonde," is up to her waist in a mound of earth that takes up the entire center of the stage. She sleeps hunched over, her head in her arms, which are resting on the slope in front of her. Only the long, piercing, twice repeated shrill of a bell wakes them from their slumber. Next to her is a large black shopping bag from which she digs a revolver in the course of the first act - in addition to various hygiene items, make-up utensils and a magnifying glass. She tries to protect herself against the blazing sun, in which the piece is bathed from beginning to end, with a small parasol, which soon goes up in flames. Her upper body, with a pearl necklace hanging over its bare shoulders, has already become so stiff that she cannot turn back enough to see what is going on behind her.
In the second act, only Winnie's head looks out of the “burial mound”, and he can only move his mouth and eyes. Behind the hill - not only invisible to Winnie, but mostly invisible (except for the back of the head) to the viewer - is her husband Willie. While Winnie monologues almost continuously, her husband's contributions are limited to a few gestures and words. He reads the headlines and advertisements of an old daily newspaper, with which he occasionally fans cool air, and answers Winnie's questions in monosyllables or not at all. Once he lets himself be carried away to a few croaking tones of a song, then he remains silent for a long time, so that Winnie suspects that he has died or become deaf and dumb. Only in the last minute does he leave his cover and come on all fours, but crawl out in full evening wear and, accompanied by Winnie's cheers, tries to climb the hill to reach her face. Vain. He slips and remains exhausted, face down, at her feet. When he has regained strength enough to at least lift his head, he whispers her name once, barely audible. The two old men stare long and motionless until the curtain has fallen.
interpretation
"Human existence as a border situation between life and death, characters who insist on the eternally disappointed illusion of waiting or the certainty of playing in tragicomic helplessness of their decline -. That is what all the pieces Beckett's" In the cycle, such apocalyptic scenarios shows Happy Days the human death in the "penultimate stage of dissolution".
In the standing still time, only rhythmic by ringing the bell, fragments of memories of the good old days (“the old style”) appear again and again: of the first kiss, of Winnie's doll Dolly and “of the last two human beings that came here lost ”. It was a curious couple (Mr Shower or Cooker and his unnamed companion) who disrespectfully wondered behind Winnie's back why she was in the ground, whether she was naked underneath, why Willie did not dig her up and what all that meant "Mean" - typical questions that the audience probably also asks, whose reactions are anticipated by Beckett in this way, integrated into the piece and at the same time commented mockingly ("all nonsense").
The absurdity of this tragic comedy manifests itself externally in the fact that the two remaining people - they only have a torso, then only a head; He is no longer homo erectus , but just a groaning four-legged friend - despite their hopeless situation, continue to imagine that they will experience happy days , do not take off their festive clothes, hide themselves about reality with sentimental songs, still react electrified to the weakest signs of life and new hope to scoop. Winnie in particular, who spends all of her time on the care and cosmetics of her decaying body, which is literally sinking into a grave, and thus practicing permanent self-mummification, documents the paradox of the situation and the naivete of the protagonist. But Willie, whose last flare-up of sexual greed - as a grotesque climax and end point - once again casts a spark of ridiculous vitality from him, underlines the sadly bizarre caricature of the human species.
Footnotes
- ^ Kindler's Neues Literatur Lexikon , Ba-Boc, page 380.