"Fiona Shaw is indisputably the queen of the mountain in Deborah Warner's blazing production of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days."
—The New York Times

"...quite simply the best Beckett production I have seen, and the first play to earn TONY's full six-star rating in the nearly two years we have employed it."
—Time Out New York

HAPPY DAYS

• BY SAMUEL BECKETT
• NATIONAL THEATRE OF GREAT BRITAIN
• DIRECTED BY DEBORAH WARNER

Jan 8—Feb 2

Tue—Fri at 7:30pm
Sat at 2pm & 7:30pm
Sun at 3pm

BAM Harvey Theater
Running time: 100min with intermission
Sold out!

The magnificent Fiona Shaw renews her partnership with director Deborah Warner—following the pair's stunning Medea (BAM 2002 Next Wave Festival)—in an arresting performance as a woman faced with no option but optimism. Inhabiting Beckett's taut prose, voluminous silences, and angular rhythms, Shaw discovers an emotional space where even the merest fragments of something are infinitely richer than nothing.

A piercing bell sounds, and Winnie, buried in rubble up to her waist, awakes. Trapped, she rummages in a bag, brushes her teeth, kisses her gun, and chatters to her husband Willy (Tim Potter), who all but ignores her. And yet, nothing could be better. Samuel Beckett's two-person masterpiece, Happy Days, offers a portrait in miniature of companionship at its hyperbolic limit: a couple having only one another, and then hardly that.

Set design by Tom Pye
Lighting design by Jean Kalman
Sound score by Mel Mercier
Sound design by Christopher Shutt
Costume consultant Luca Costigliolo

Photo of Fiona Shaw by Hugo Glendinning