Beckett\u2019s works<\/a> have been labelled absurd, existentialist, modern and postmodern by critics. Yet the setting presented in Happy Days (first performed in 1961) feels uniquely contemporary in our age of ongoing climate crisis<\/a>.<\/p>\n Born in Dublin in 1906, some of Beckett\u2019s earliest interactions with nature took place on local walks. Often joining his father William on lengthy excursions around the Dublin hills to avoid the religious obligation of Sunday church, these early ambles helped to imprint the landscape on his artistic consciousness. Images from these walks subsequently found their way into a number of his literary works.<\/p>\n Yet it was much later, after Beckett had abandoned a promising academic career to move to Paris and become a writer, that he encountered serious ecological and human destruction.<\/p>\n With the outbreak of the second world war, he joined the French resistance before becoming a member of the ambulance corps, based in the Normandy town of Saint-L\u00f4. As biographer James Knowlson recalls in Damned To Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett<\/a> (1996), it was here that: <\/p>\n Beckett witnessed real devastation and misery \u2026 Possessions blown to pieces; a ward full of patients ill with tuberculosis \u2026 People in desperate need of food and clothing, yet clinging desperately onto life; a hospital created out of nothing on fields that became churned into a sea of mud.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n My PhD research at the University of Liverpool explores Beckett\u2019s work. The university hosts a biennial festival dedicated to his life and works. The current iteration, Beckett: Lieben 2026<\/a>, features stagings, musical interpretations, photography, visual art and talks related to Beckett\u2019s experiences in Germany.<\/p>\n First performed 16 years after the end of the war, Happy Days features little sign of human civilisation in the near-empty, barren landscape that the two protagonists Winnie and Willie inhabit. <\/p>\n Winnie shows a desperation to cling on to life despite the constrictions of the mound, shown through her incessant activity. She frequently rummages through her bag, for example, because it is one of her only remaining means of autonomy. <\/p>\n Within the earth that constricts her body, Winnie\u2019s only remaining signs of life are her physical movements and, in the second act, her words. In a contemporary sense, action and communication are vital tools for engaging effectively with our ecological crisis, before the situation worsens and the fiction of Winnie\u2019s environmental collapse becomes a reality. <\/p>\n This article is part of Rethinking the Classics<\/a>. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon \u2013 with a twist.<\/em><\/p>\n\n
Staging Happy Days<\/h2>\n
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