Happy Days

A masterful blend of humor and compassion with a vivid sense of the bizarre, Happy Days represents one of Samuel Beckett’s finest works. The play features only two characters: Winnie, a woman of about fifty, and Willie, a man of about sixty.

In the first act Winnie is embedded up to her waist in a mound of earth, though still able to handle nearby objects of necessity (a mirror, hat, eyeglasses, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a handkerchief, a pistol); in the second act she is embedded up to her neck and can move only her eyes. Willie lives and moves on all fours behind the mound, appearing from time to time and replying only occasionally to Winnie’s cheerful chatter. And while her predicament is never explained, Winnie endures life clinging to arbitrary routines and rituals, and relying on Willie as a source of comfort, ever hopeful that ‘this is going to be a happy day.’