Happy Days

Description
The ground rises up like a hungry grave in Samuel Beckett’s mortality tale Happy Days, and when we first see Winnie—a middle-class blatherskite played by the superb Fiona Shaw, in a performance of lacerating clarity, humor and force—she is planted waist-deep in a mound of scorched earth, already half-devoured. The most accessible of Beckett’s works, the play is a brilliantly witty metaphor for the desperate comforts of mundane ritual in the face of decay and inevitable death, and Deborah Warner’s production is a magnificent achievement: quite simply the best Beckett production I have seen, and the first play to earn TONY’s full six-star rating.—AF