Happy Days

A piercing bell sounds, and Winnie, buried in rubble up to her waist, awakes. Trapped, she rummages in a bag, brushes her teeth, kisses her gun, and chatters to her husband Willy, who all but ignores her. And yet, nothing could be better.

Samuel Beckett’s two-person masterpiece, Happy Days, offers a portrait in miniature of companionship at its hyperbolic limit: a couple having only one another, and then hardly that.