Happy Days
Herald Theatre, Aotea Centre, The Edge, Auckland
20/08/2010 - 18/09/2010
Production Details
LIFE GETS EVEN MORE OUTRAGEOUS FOR ROBYN MALCOLM
After a three-year hiatus, Outrageous Fortune star Robyn Malcolm returns to the stage to celebrate this thing we called life in Silo Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s classic HAPPY DAYS, opening at the Herald Theatre on August 20.
Amidst blazing light and scorched grass, Winnie is half-buried in a mound. Still she greets each day with a smile, rummaging around in her handbag, applying makeup, brushing her teeth and nattering away to her husband. She’s always got a loaded revolver stashed away should it all get too much. Hers might not be the ideal life, but should a happy day come her way she’ll seize it with both hands. Buried slowly beneath the mire of an indifferent universe, Winnie offers the bravest response possible. She persists.
Samuel Beckett was a humorist. Not that you’d guess it from the reverential tones used to describe the great Nobel Laureate absurdist or the stern-faced portraits glaring back at you from show programmes. His masterpiece HAPPY DAYS was “influenced” by Beckett’s wife Maureen, who on seeing his earlier Krapp’s Last Tape, demanded he write “a happier play”. At the heart of all his plays, no matter how bleak, are nonsensical situations, with a strange familiarity, played out by buffoons not unlike ourselves.
Such was the import of Samuel Beckett and his work, that he has become historic in his native Ireland, with a bridge named after him in Dublin, an appearance on a commemorative coin on the 100th anniversary of his birth and a hallowed Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, “for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation”.
If the peak of an actor’s career is to be buried up to her neck and still glory in life, then who but Robyn Malcolm is up to the task? She is after all, one of New Zealand’s most prolific and celebrated actors. In a theatre career spanning 22 years, she has performed for every major theatre company in the country, playing in everything from gritty European classics to home-grown comedies. She is perhaps best known however, for her onscreen work. Her work as Shortland Street ’s Ellen Crozier and then as Outrageous Fortune’s Cheryl West has garnered her 11 major awards and countless other nominations. She has spent much of 2010 working in Sydney, shooting the feature film Burning Man and the new Australian drama Rake.
Robyn is in good company, joining forces with old drama school chum Cameron Rhodes and director Michael Hurst. Rhodes continues his long association with Silo Theatre, following his star turns in Loot, The Threepenny Opera and the current production of Assassins. Hurst will once again take a modern masterpiece and distil its abiding essence, taking audiences to the brink in a visually arresting production of this legendary work, which has not been seen in Auckland since 1975, when a Theatre Corporate production starred Elizabeth McRae and Roy Billing.
HAPPY DAYS plays
20th August – 18th September 2010
Herald Theatre, Aotea Centre, THE EDGE
Mon-Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm
Tickets: $20.00 – $39.00 (service fees will apply)
Tickets available through THE EDGE – www.buytickets.co.nz or 09 357 3355
publicity: ELEPHANT PUBLICITY
Superb performances fire up Beckett work
Review by Paul Simei-Barton 23rd Aug 2010
A seldom-produced work by one of the 20th century’s most influential writers affords an opportunity to experience the genius of Samuel Beckett in its most minimal form.
The play is essentially a monologue from a middle-aged woman who is slowly sinking into a mound of earth. She faces up to this existential nightmare with a chirpy “can’t complain” optimism – constantly grasping at the mundane things that let her enjoy her “happy days”.
As to what it all means – critics must tread carefully. [More]
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Pragmatic optimism v recalcitrance
Review by Nik Smythe 22nd Aug 2010
Front stage curtains are unusual in this day and age; I’m not quite sure when was the last time I saw them. Soon I realise the relevance of this oddly antiquated feature as the protagonist Winnie remarks for the first of several times on ‘the Old Style’.
Said drapes open to reveal her sleeping, buried waist-high in John Verryt’s set, a barren dune of sand, or pale dirt, surrounded by a hazy, yellowing cloudy blue sky and illumed by a blaring light – designed by Sean Lynch with Jane Hakaraia – that barely changes throughout the play except perhaps to grow even brighter.
Beautifully cast and making the best use of her throatily feminine voice, Robyn Malcolm’s Winnie is a bubbly old dear, whose apparently numerous years far outstrip her fresh, comparatively vibrant appearance. She wakes to a jarring school-bell type alarm, says her prayers and attends to her ablutions, all the while babbling observational platitudes as animatedly as one can while buried up to their ‘big bosom’.
When Winnie addresses her husband Willie, a grouchily aloof Cameron Rhodes emerges from behind the large earth mound, with painful slowness, dons a knotted hanky and a skimmer straw hat and seemingly proceeds to ignore her. To her side and with his back to us with his nose stuck in the paper, only his occasional monosyllabic and extremely rare whole, short sentences give any indication he’s listening at all.
If from this point you hope or expect that by the end of the play the character’s motivations and journeys will be explained and told, you may risk disappointment as this 1961 play is as abstract and obscure as Beckett gets, which is saying something!
Director Michael Hurst has focused predominantly on character: Malcolm’s eternally friendly, pragmatically optimistic biddy against Rhodes’ coarse, recalcitrant old bastard whom she loves so dearly. The purpose of this sort of theatre is not a puzzle to be solved in the conventional sense, rather a kind of attitude or energy to be encountered for its own worth.
Certainly narrative can be embellished from Winnie’s effusive chat; it seems to me that this is an ageing woman holding on to her lifelong rituals and her fading recollections of the life she’s lived with as much dignity as could be expected of one in her position. But there’s a lot of me in that description – the information given remains sufficiently ambiguous for one to never be quite sure. As I say, the information is not the point.
An extract from Peter Brook in the programme puts it in a way I see no cause to rephrase: ‘[the] audience leaves his plays, his black plays, nourished and enriched, with a lighter heart, full of strange irrational joy.’ Perhaps then this joy is the source of the Happy Day that Winnie anticipates and occasionally grasps.
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For more production details, click on the title above. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
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