About Samuel Beckett | About The Play | The Cast | The Crew | The Director | Design Team |
| Characters | Influences | Special Event |
| Characters | Influences | Special Event |
About Happy Days
HAPPY DAYS is a play in two acts, written by Samuel Beckett
Beckett began the play on 8 October 1960 and the English version was completed on 14 May 1961. Beckett finished the translation into French by November 1962 but amended the title. In a moment of inspiration, he borrowed the title Oh les beaux jours, from Verlaine’s poem, Colloque sentimental’". Cyril Cussack claimed that Happy Days was, by Beckett’s own admission, ‘influenced’ by Cusack's wife, Maureen Cusack’s request that he ‘write a happy play’ after Krapp's Last Tape.
Beckett confided to Brenda Bruce what was going through his mind as he sat down to write the play:
Beckett began the play on 8 October 1960 and the English version was completed on 14 May 1961. Beckett finished the translation into French by November 1962 but amended the title. In a moment of inspiration, he borrowed the title Oh les beaux jours, from Verlaine’s poem, Colloque sentimental’". Cyril Cussack claimed that Happy Days was, by Beckett’s own admission, ‘influenced’ by Cusack's wife, Maureen Cusack’s request that he ‘write a happy play’ after Krapp's Last Tape.
Beckett confided to Brenda Bruce what was going through his mind as he sat down to write the play:
He said: "Well I thought that the most dreadful thing that could happen to anybody, would be not to be allowed to sleep so that just as you’re dropping off there’d be a ‘Dong’ and you’d have to keep awake; you’re sinking into the ground alive and it’s full of ants;and the sun is shining endlessly day and night and there is not a tree … there’s no shade, nothing, and that bell wakes you up all the time and all you’ve got is a little parcel of things to see you through life." He was referring to the life of the modern woman. Then he said: "And I thought who would cope with that and go down singing, only a woman."
Winnie, the main character in this play, is embedded in a mound of earth, up to her waist in the first act and up to her neck in the second. She lives in an arid landscape in a blinding and unrelenting bright sunlight. We learn that she has not always been buried in this way but we never discover how she came to be trapped so.
A number of suggestions have been put forth to explain where the idea for the original imagery originated. Beckett biographer, James Knowlson, has suggested images from Luis Buñuel’s 1928 film, Un chien andalou or a photograph by Angus McBean of Frances Day.
Beckett required the set to have "a maximum of simplicity and symmetry" with a "very pompier trompe-l'oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance". "What should characterise [the] whole scene, sky and earth," he wrote, "is a pathetic unsuccessful realism, the kind of tawdriness you get in a 3rd rate musical or pantomime, that quality of pompier, laughably earnest bad imitation."
The scene is reminiscent of a seaside postcard with Winnie buried in the sand and Willie with his knotted handkerchief and his boater. The fake backdrop calls to mind also the kind used by photographers that feature a painted body on a sheet of wood with a hole cut out where the head belongs popular at holiday venues. Even the title of the play, Happy Days, is the kind of expression typically used when reminiscing about these kinds of holidays. Of note is the fact that he worked on the play while in the English seaside resort of Folkestone.
A number of suggestions have been put forth to explain where the idea for the original imagery originated. Beckett biographer, James Knowlson, has suggested images from Luis Buñuel’s 1928 film, Un chien andalou or a photograph by Angus McBean of Frances Day.
Beckett required the set to have "a maximum of simplicity and symmetry" with a "very pompier trompe-l'oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance". "What should characterise [the] whole scene, sky and earth," he wrote, "is a pathetic unsuccessful realism, the kind of tawdriness you get in a 3rd rate musical or pantomime, that quality of pompier, laughably earnest bad imitation."
The scene is reminiscent of a seaside postcard with Winnie buried in the sand and Willie with his knotted handkerchief and his boater. The fake backdrop calls to mind also the kind used by photographers that feature a painted body on a sheet of wood with a hole cut out where the head belongs popular at holiday venues. Even the title of the play, Happy Days, is the kind of expression typically used when reminiscing about these kinds of holidays. Of note is the fact that he worked on the play while in the English seaside resort of Folkestone.