Happy Days

Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow Sep 2;

Friar’s Gate Theatre, Limerick Sep 3;

Conary Arts Centre, Wicklow Sep 4-8 €12-€16 01-2724302

For anyone yet to discover Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, the title always carries a sense of warm familiarity, one that comes with its own theme tune and perhaps a cameo appearance by The Fonz. That this play’s main character – its only speaker – begins the show buried in the earth up to her waist and concludes it swallowed up to the neck dampens the cheery promise

a little. And yet it might be

the most optimistic post- apocalyptic view in all of drama. Winnie is defiant in her efforts to go on, even when she can’t go on.

One of the few plays Beckett wrote in English, Happy Days now reaches us in a production from Argentinian group La Compañía, directed by long-time Beckett acolyte Sergio Amigo and featuring Viviana Lombardi as Winnie, the endless talker who inscribes her existence daily on to an unforgiving world through comic routine and endearing prattle.

Beckettologists will have seen many Winnies, from the sensitivity of Rosaleen Linehan to the overbearing irony of Fiona Shaw, yet few would suggest there could ever be a definitive portrayal. Winnie’s predicament remains an affecting puzzle, an absurd glance that somehow speaks to us all. As the song has it, these happy days are yours and mine.

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I Am of Ireland, James Joyce Centre, Dublin