Theatre
In Pamela Rabe and Nick Schlieper’s steely co-production of Happy Days for Sydney Theatre Company, Winnie isn’t pretending – she’s surviving. By Cassie Tongue.
Reality bites in STC’s Happy Days
Inside Wharf 1 Theatre sits a constructed, constrained tableau, where a black box in the playing space marks out a narrowed, forced proscenium. Inside that is a distinctly unreal grey mound, lightly textured but too hard and with too much shine to read as rock or earth, backdropped by clean, white nothing. It’s so unlike any space in nature – so clear in its refusal to conjure a relatable image of a world we know – that it feels both abstractly artistic and scientific. It’s a contradiction of ideas.
After howling winds and ghostly rushings of sound, the lights come up. At first it’s so bright you need to squint or look away to bear it. Finally, we adjust, and there she is: a woman buried past her waist in that grey, sloping mound. Everything else is already so strange that she seems perfectly placed right in the centre, her head in her hands, asleep or feigning sleep. A siren blares until she wakes, and she looks up and out towards the audience. Soon she will smile brightly.
This is Winnie, theatre’s great optimist.
Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days sits at the intersection of modernism and theatre of the absurd. We never discover why Winnie and husband, Willie, are trapped, what has happened to their world or why that bell rings to tell them when to sleep and wake, but the play’s probing, precise script interrogates a very human problem in a very real way. How do we go on when our worlds are forever altered? How do we go on when we know there’s no going back?
This new production is co-directed for Sydney Theatre Company by legendary stage actor and director Pamela Rabe, who plays Winnie, and Nick Schlieper, who also designed the set and lighting and is currently nominated for a Tony Award for his lighting design on The Picture of Dorian Gray, originally staged by STC and now playing on Broadway. Schlieper is estimated to have worked on the most shows in STC history – this is his 104th. Rabe first worked with the company in 1989 on a production of Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral. The pair have collaborated on a dozen shows over the course of their careers.
This production, their first co-directorial partnership, displays their well-matched and neatly aligned vision for a play that can be remixed and staged to accompany endless possibilities and approaches: post-apocalyptic landscapes, mounds made of landfill, worlds scorched by changing weather patterns. In their shared directors’ note, the pair explain that though they were inspired to stage the play in response to urgent current issues such as climate disaster, they decided against a deliberately allegorical interpretation. They chose to set the play in an estranged world to permit the audience to make their own connections to different problems and struggles. It’s a liberating creative offer.
The result is an approach to the play that is complete, cohesive and alienating: there is very little for us to hold on to. Beckett’s stage directions – which are tightly choreographed, breaking into the script every few words to describe Winnie’s gestures, facial expressions and prop placements as she talks, and talks, reaching into her black bag for her small and sacred collection of possessions – generally call for evidence of baked earth or dead grasses. Without these touches, we are floating in a world that means everything or nothing. We need Winnie to give it all meaning.
The role is demanding, both physically – the second act sees Winnie buried up to her neck – and mentally, with the bulk of the running time devoted solely to Winnie’s chatter as she moves through her day, or what passes for a day in her new reality – to speak of a day, Winnie points out repeatedly, is to speak of “the old style”. There’s a rhythm to it, a dance of movement and line, near-lyric in the script, that is part of the play’s heightened, expressionistic template – a score each actor playing Winnie can interpret, within those parameters, to make something new.
And then there is the optimism. Winnie wakes trapped, says her prayers and prepares for consciousness, from toothbrush to lipstick. She proclaims the day is another happy one. As we move through the show and Winnie gets caught up in circular references and repetitive words and movements, the embrace of the endless possibility of the day – to speak of the old style – begins to feel progressively dark.
Rabe’s Winnie, however, starts with an intriguing proposition: what if Winnie already knows a happy day isn’t possible? What if she isn’t an optimist at all but a pragmatist, choosing a veil of brightness for the sheer sake of survival?
Right from the beginning we see Winnie’s herculean attempts to pull herself together. The first time she looks out at us, she looks devastated – but just for a moment. With every slipped smile and moment of anguish, we watch her reach into her depths and find some lightness to bring out to the surface – ostensibly for Willie but more clearly, we see, for herself.
Rabe has a gift for finding the spot where the steeliness of a character gives way just before they are going to break: she can ride a knife-edge of vulnerability right into a meltdown and out again. Her Winnie, it’s clear, is well-practised at pushing down her grief, releasing it in short, pressure-valve bursts, and putting on her cheeriest voice to make up for it. We’re watching a performance within a performance, a woman puppeting herself towards something more pleasing. There are still laughs in this production, but Rabe’s Winnie isn’t courting them outright. Nor Willie, either.
She saves both her most heartbreaking pleas and her strongest venom for Willie. It feels as if she has been putting on a positive face for this man for such a long time that she can’t stop now, even in this hellscape, talking and talking in the hope that today – to speak of the old style – he’ll engage in a conversation. There’s a hint of strongly controlled, deeply felt female rage thrumming underneath her performance.
Markus Hamilton plays Willie, a small but crucial role. Hamilton, a stand-out in STC’s recent production of August Wilson’s Fences, is a steady presence that leans crucially stagnant. He grunts. He’s coarse. He’s not handling this way of living very well. The gun hiding in Winnie’s bag of belongings, which she takes out at one point and kisses, must be kept out of his reach for fear of what he might do with it. He often refuses to answer when she calls for him. Hamilton relishes each moment, taking his time to extend a word or a groan, keeping Winnie waiting with what feels like a cruel pleasure.
In the face of these many absences, Winnie makes herself undeniably present. She remembers people and events, quotes fragments of Shakespeare and Yeats, brushes her teeth, puts on her feathery hat and faces what might come. By keeping her memories alive, she finds something undeniable in them: they keep her connected to her humanity.
Rabe and Schlieper have cut out the play’s intermission, keeping the action locked into a 100-minute running time. After a short blackout, haunted by a sparing sound design from Stefan Gregory that sounds a little as if you’re falling into hell, we find Winnie buried to her neck. The lighting has shifted her into an eerier dimension. A cool blue wash spotlights Winnie and the rest is darkness.
In 1961, American theatre director and critic Harold Clurman described Happy Days as “a poem for the stage, a poem of despair and forbearance ... perhaps to wait and pray in the empty world is to evince a trait of nobility, even of heroism”. In this production, darker in Rabe’s performance and in its staging, there is plenty of despair. In place of forbearance is something less noble, something more hardscrabble and knowing. This Winnie knows there are no more happy days. She isn’t pretending all is well: she’s simply refusing to surrender.
Happy Days is playing at the Wharf 1 Theatre, Sydney, until June 15.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 17, 2025 as "No surrender".
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