Happy Days (play) - Background

Background

Beckett was heavily involved with a number of productions. His letters to Alan Schneider make particularly interesting reading – he included a number of diagrams detailing how the mound could be constructed – but it was to Brenda Bruce he confided what was actually going through his mind as he sat down to write the play:

He said: “Well I thought that the most dreadful thing that could happen to anybody, would be not to be allowed to sleep so that just as you’re dropping off there’s be a ‘Dong’ and you’d have to keep awake; you’re sinking into the ground alive and it’s full of ants; and the sun is shining endlessly day and night and there is not a tree … there’s no shade, nothing, and that bell wakes you up all the time and all you’ve got is a little parcel of things to see you through life.” He was talking about a woman’s life, let’s face it. Then he said: “And I thought who would cope with that and go down singing, only a woman.”

In the play only a single egg-carrying ant – Winnie uses the archaic term emmet – finds its way into the text but it is a source of amusement for both Winnie and Willie when its appearance causes Willie to utter the word “formication” though perhaps not for the same reason. Beckett suggests that Willie “is laughing at the image of ants devouring and she at the image of the ants devouring herself.” Likely its similarity to the word “fornication” is also a factor.

A number of suggestions have been put forth to explain where the idea for the original imagery originated from. James Knowlson has suggested images from Luis Buñuel’s 1928 film, Un chien andalou or a photograph by Angus McBean of Frances Day but there is no clear evidence to support either.

Beckett was particularly keen that there be both a symmetry and an artificiality to the set. A very pompier trompe-l'oeil backcloth (“picture window wall”) was to be used to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance. “What should characterise whole scene, sky and earth,” he wrote, “is a pathetic unsuccessful realism, the kind of tawdriness you get in a 3rd rate musical or pantomime, that quality of pompier, laughably earnest bad imitation.”

The scene is reminiscent of a seaside postcard with Winnie buried in the sand and Willie with his knotted handkerchief and his boater. The fake backdrop calls to mind also the kind used by photographers that feature a painted body on a sheet of wood with a hole cut out where the head belongs popular at holiday venues. Even the title of the play, Happy Days, is the kind of expression typically used when reminiscing about these kinds of holidays. Of note is the fact that he worked on the play while in the English seaside resort of Folkstone during the two weeks he was obliged to be resident in the area before his marriage to Suzanne could officially take place.

In his book, The Beckett Country, Eoin O’Brien reveals a connection between Beckett’s first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Happy Days. There is a description of a woman rummaging through her fathomless bag. The location, O’Brien identifies as a quiet cove known as Jack’s Hole in County Wicklow. That the play might take place in Ireland is also suggested by the fact that Willie is said to have been reading from an Irish Sunday paper.

Beckett experimented with different newspaper headlines before he settled on what appears in print. In the second holograph he included three which are of interest (at this time Willie is still ‘B’):

Rocket strikes Pomona. Seven hundred thousand missing. (Pause. B turns page.) Rocket strikes – . One female lavatory attendant spared. (Pause. B turns page.) Rocket strikes – . 3 priests survive.

Although excised from the final text it has been suggested that what Beckett was thinking about here was a post-apocalyptic setting and many reviewers describe the setting so. Similar claims have been made with regards to Endgame and Rough for Theatre I.