Winnie’s happy days and the Duchess of Malfi’s catastrophic days are expressed in and by totally contrasting settings on South Bank stages.
Beckett’s Happy Days is playing at the Young Vic. Juliet Stevenson is Winnie. It’s the best performance of this character we have seen and the play reveals more of itself as one gets older. We recognise the apparent protection that daily routine provides against the searing reality of the human condition. Unless we are strong and self-sufficient (since ultimately we are alone) the fierce and relentless power of circumstance, like the blazing, bleaching sun in Beckett’s dramatic metaphor, will consume us. Winnie’s world becomes more and more circumscribed as the hard, dry sand in which she is half-buried, then buried up to the neck, steadily restricts her range of acts. But her range of seeing, in her mind’s eye, and expressing herself in speech is not restricted. At the very last, the outgoing and benevolent impulse, and gratitude for sentient life -‘great mercies, great mercies’ – is still in her words to her largely wordless husband as the light finally goes out. We believed her.
The Duchess of Malfi’s life is brutally extinguished by strangling in a foul prison, yet even her last words express gratitude for the comfort of knowing that her husband is (for the moment) still alive. But did we believe her trials and her misery? True, her mantra is ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ so she, like Winnie, is hanging on. But Gemma Arterton’s demeanour was too unruffled, her resistance to the malevolence of her crazed and murderous brothers too simply social, too polite, for us to connect fully with Webster’s churning characters.
The production is fascinating for the setting, the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe. A close replica of the late 16th-century indoor theatre at Blackfriars, it is an intimate wooden space, lit principally by candlelight. The period music, the shape of the space, the intricacies of the stage entrances and balcony supplied much intriguing atmosphere. The changing light from the ‘day’ seen through windows which were closed as the play progressed, to the different effects achieved by full chandeliers or small sconces showed what possibilities there might be. The darker the scene the more dramatic, particularly in a play so melodramatic as this, were the effects of the candlelight. Future productions will explore this.
Two very powerful female leading roles, in utterly contrasting settings, carry us from the 17th to the 21st century, and explore again the unchanging forces that create and play upon us as human beings.