The Berlin stage can often be the site of great spectacle. Walter D. Asmus’s Happy Days is no such theatre. It is instead a theatre of the word, an opportunity to experience Samuel Beckett’s poetic text – or more precisely, phrase (as given life by the actor Mary Kelly).
In this strangely pleasurable performance of Beckett’s apocalypse in miniature, ably directed by Beckett’s longtime collaborator Asmus, the phrase ‘happy days’ serves as a choral refrain, acquiring compounding significance and humour each time its star, Kelly, pronounces it.
Everything depends on the actor’s expressiveness and her facility with Beckett’s text.
Kelly shines as Winnie, a half-buried woman stranded on an island for some time, carrying on a largely one-sided conversation with her husband, Willie (Tomas Spencer), who might be stuck in his cave or even dead. Despite their predicament, both ridiculous and upsetting, Kelly continues to name their situation one of ‘happy days’.
In Asmus’s spartan production – the stagecraft is limited to a raised stage that buries Kelly first from the waist down and then up to the head – everything depends on the actor’s expressiveness and her facility with Beckett’s text.
And indeed she manages to find the rhythm and realism in the absurdity, finding bathos and pathos in her agony, acting against Beckettian alienation to draw the audience into her struggle. Still, the final impression is of her lilting delivery of Beckett’s text and the renewed life she gives his words – bearing out Asmus’s decision to let her delivery carry the show, no special effects necessary. ★★★★
- English Theatre Berlin, Fidicinstr. 40, Kreuzberg, Jun 7 and 8, details.
