Not such Happy Days...

What: Happy Days

Where: Young Vic, SE1

When: until 8th March

Price: Various

Disclaimer: do not book tickets for this as a February blues pick-me-up. The poster’s colourful, the title’s promising, but the only comedy you’ll get it the bleakest of tragicomedy.

Having said that, if you’re of sturdy disposition with an interest in 1960’s surrealist theatre, step right up.

To start with, you will be given two hours of one of the most celebrated avant-garde plays. First performed in 1961, Samuel Beckett’s _Happy Days _seeks to portray the condition of the modern woman. The whole of the two acts are focused entirely on the main character, Winnie, with occasional comments or grunts from her surly, detached, newspaper-reading husband.

Throughout the play Winnie is progressively buried in sand, unable to move, under scorching heat, while her husband, who mainly lives in a hole hidden form the audience, can crawl around. A jarring, ear-splitting bell rings at intervals, giving Winnie her sleeping and waking times. No explanation is given for this odd set up, and though Winnie refers vaguely to a previous life there is the feeling of being immersed in a timeless, unchanging landscape – the only movement the sand that trickles down on Winnie, slowly burying her alive.

The next bonus of this Young Vic production is Juliet Stevenson, nominated for five Olivier awards and four BAFTAs, screen and theatre actress and a truly fantastic Winnie. It is thanks to her that this surreal, vague outline takes life as a terrifying reality of overwhelming existential panic.

As she sits there, buried in the sand, she prattles away, sounding like a middle-class, 1960’s housewife with her constant references to the small mercies in life, her reliance on her handbag and her affectionate and irritated references to her husband. But in her circumstances, these commonplace instances take on an anguishing meaning: the small mercies are meaningless, as she is dying under the heat and the sand, her handbag includes hairbrushes, mirrors and a revolver, her husband sits uncaringly as she panics under the rising tide of sand that covers her.

Her post-war cheeriness is interspersed with rising panic, nonsensical comments and her gradual loss of memory. By the second act, Winnies strident, forcedly-cheerful voice has subsided into a resigned drone, and the blare of her waking up bell rings again as again, forcing her to sit up and open her bleary, sleep deprived eyes. _Happy Days _shows a woman being tortured. Physically tortured certainly, but far more gruesomely mentally tortured by her husband’s indifference, her inability to change her condition, her isolation, her loss of memory.

For those willing to find them, there are many metaphors in Happy Days: are we all being suppressed by the ever moving sands of time? Are we all being progressively being buried in a hole, relying on our daily routines to survive? Are we all screaming out to our nearest and dearest, as they sit oblivious?

I won’t draw these conclusions for you, but I urge you to go, and see for yourselves.

And if all gets too much, the Young Vic has a really good bar, the Cut. You might need a fortifying drink at the interval to steady yourself.