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Interview: Vikki Anderson on Directing Samuel Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’ for Soulpepper. by Dario Del Degan
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“Interview: Vikki Anderson on Directing Samuel Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’ for Soulpepper.”
July 02, 2003

‘HAPPY DAYS’ By Samuel Beckett Presented by Soulpepper in association with DVxT Directed and designed by Vikki Anderson Lighting by Bonnie Beecher Sound by John Gzowski Starring: Martha Burns, Michael Simpson
Plot Synopsis:

‘Happy Days’ opens with the character Winnie, a middle-aged woman immersed to the waist in a mound of earth, proclaiming ‘Another heavenly day’ as the start of lengthy monologue to her husband Willie, barely visible behind the heap. Though Willie rarely says anything, when he does, Winnie reacts with elation ‘Oh you are going to talk to me today, this is going to be a happy day.’ Finding herself physically constrained, Winnie occupies her time by taking personal possessions in and out of her sizeable bag, including a music box, a revolver, and a parasol that bursts into flames once opened. Though a bell signals her sleeping and waking, Winnie fills her day with memories, quotations, stories, dreams, and a bit of dialogue. As the physical constraints of her situation worsens as the play progresses, Winnie discovers freedom through her mind, to secure the last remnants of hope and optimism to focus that which makes her happy. In anticipation of the upcoming production of Happy Days presented by Soulpepper in association with DVxT, I asked director and designer Vikki Anderson about her approach to realizing Beckett’s text.

AN INTERVIEW WITH VIKKI ANDERSON 06/26/2003 By Dario Del Degan

DDD: How did the collaboration between DVxT and Soulpepper materialize for this production of ‘Happy Days’?

VA: I approached Martha [Burns] to work on this project solely with DVxT. Martha was really keen to do it but the only time slot she had available to work with us was bordering on her Soulpepper time. So she went back to Albert Schultz, who is the artistic director of Soulpepper, and said: ‘I have this opportunity to work on ‘Happy Days’ but it might cut into Soulpepper, how do you feel about that?’ He said: ‘That has always been a short listed play for us to work on, why don’t we start thinking of a co-production.’ Since the designers we work with in our company are the same designers Soulpepper works with, it wasn’t a big stretch to bring our team along and integrate it in with Soulpepper’s team. Our lighting designer and sound designer are both working on No Man’s Land, which we are in rep. with here. But it all started because I knew that Martha was right for the role of Winnie.

DDD: How did DVxT’s mandate ‘to work on challenging texts with a focus on longer rehearsal time and an organic design process’ materialize for this production of ‘Happy Days’?

VA: We work a six-week rehearsal period, and Soulpepper gave that to us. They let us have an extra week. The thing about it being an ‘organic design process,’ is that because I serve as the designer and the director, I am able to make changes as we rehearse, right as things are happening. So rather than something coming up in rehearsal, that has to be taken down as a note, that then has to go to the designer, that then has to be talked about outside of rehearsal, maybe the impetus for the change isn’t understood as well as in the moment in rehearsal. In terms of the word ‘organic,’ the nature of that is that it means that we can let things happen as they need to. The show can just grow as it grows without having all these middlemen and notes flying around about why things should be a certain way. And we can still make changes as they come up.

DDD: Which text served as the basis for this production of ‘Happy Days’ – the published version or the revised text based on Beckett’s Theatrical Notebooks?

VA: We started with the published version, and included every change that Beckett made for the Royal Court Production [1979]. I made my own annotated text because there are too many changes; it was too difficult to work from [the Notebooks]. All changes by Beckett are included so that we could always have the choice to go back to the original if we felt that it was more appropriate. Because I was able to set it up this way, I was able to divide the script into Beckett’s breaks using his titles. So, we have a fully annotated script that we work from that has all the original quotes. I also used the letters he wrote to [Alan] Schneider when [the director] was working on it, so any time that any of the designers, or actors, or any of us working on it would run across something in the text where we would want any further explanation, I end-noted it. We have our own working script, but it doesn’t deviate at all from anything that was prescribed by Beckett.

DDD: Did you find that there were moments when you looked at one of is revisions, but decided the original was more appropriate?

VA: Never. His revisions were all correct. Every single one of them was bang on.

DDD: As director, what was your approach to staging Beckett’s Happy Days? Did you approach the text with reverence to the author (considering his reputation for discouraging innovative modifications to his work), or did you consider the text like any other drama, open to interpretation and manipulation by the production team?

VA: When you first start working on it you think: ‘Oh I could do my own super-clever stuff to this.’ But then you realize that you can’t. You realize that he knows better, and always has. Everyone always talks about the musicality of his works, and I have some musical background, but it wasn’t until about three weeks into rehearsal when I realized what that meant. What it meant for us, and what it meant for me, was that the piece had to be learned the way that you learn a piece of music. You don’t sit down with a piece of music and do all kinds of exploration first, which is what you normally do with a piece of theatre–you usually get the script, and cross out all the stage directions, and you just play to find your own way of doing it. With Beckett, you learn it all the way you learn a piece of music. You go over it, and over it, and over it until you master the piece, and then you start playing. When you know the piece so well, that it is in your body, then you can make subtle changes to make it your own. So, we worked backwards on this piece. Martha came to rehearsal almost fully memorized, and we started with the full set and with all the props. We started with everything. We just ran the play until [Martha] was able to do it freely. Then I would start taking notes and work on sections. It was all very gradual and very slow, and everything happens in great long flows. If you starting taking things out of the sequence for too long, it stops making sense. So we constantly ran everything in sequence. It’s a very different process, but you have to trust Beckett, which you do after a while.

What’s frustrating is that in the learning of it, whereas in a normal play you might decide what the interior monologue is for some particular moment, you might decide, ‘these are the thoughts I’m naming, these are the verbs, these are the intentions I’m going to play while I’m saying those words, therefore I’ll take a pause here, I’ll take a breath there,’ Beckett has already decided where your pauses and breaths are, so it takes a long time to figure out what he means, or to find your own way into what it means. You might think the story is about something and want to tell it in a certain way, but if you were to take the pauses [Beckett] has given you, it couldn’t mean that. It can’t mean the same thing if you have to breathe here or breathe there, and you have to figure out what the hell it means if I breathe here. This has been a lot of the work that we have been doing–trying to make the flow of the thoughts work for the actress, so she can actually get through it.

DDD: Did you approach the text with a contemporary sensibility, or a historical one, based on the social climate of the time when the piece was written?

VA: We have loosely based [Winnie’s] character on someone who is from the late 50s or early 60s, and we have loosely based [Willie’s] character on someone from the 30s, understanding that they can both be contemporaries. We understand where all the moments in their personal histories happen together, but we haven’t said: ‘they got married in 1920, and they did this…’ We haven’t felt we’ve needed to solve these questions. It’s not that we’ve modernized it. It definitely is of ‘a time.’ It is of a time in which the term ‘old style’ may be used. And that’s where we’ve loosely based everything–this concept of the ‘old style’ and what it evokes for people? We tried to give it that look without saying definitively: ‘this is 1947 and it’s two years after the war and it must mean this.’ Winnie is a woman that exists in all times, and so she has to be recognizable to us as someone whom we might meet now, or as our old aunt who was in the prime of her life in the 50s. We have to see both of these women, which is what we’ve tried to do.

DDD: Based on the production history of ‘Happy Days’, there are two general approaches toward realizing Winnie’s character. In the 1974-75 production at the National Theatre in London, directed by Peter Hall (with Beckett’s presence in rehearsal) starring Peggy Ashcroft, Winnie was portrayed as a soft and gentle, respectable character who evoked a comedy of reassurance. In the 1979 production at the Royal Court Theatre, directed by Beckett starring Billie Whitelaw, Winnie became a maniacal persona, eliciting a comedy of discontinuity. Whitelaw’s youthful appearance also highlighted the ‘sexual nature of her memories.’ Also, in the 1979 production, Winnie did not smile at all in the Second Act, coupled with rehearsal notes from Beckett describing her as ‘unaware,’ ‘scatterbrained,’ and that she ‘babbles.’ Did you follow either approach, or did you create a different type of character altogether?

VA: We’re probably leaning more toward the Peggy Ashcroft version. That stems from the work Martha is doing, and the kind of person Martha is. We’re actually just letting Martha’s creation come out. We’re not nearly making the kinds of impositions on it that Beckett was making with Billie. And she doesn’t have the dark quality that Beckett purposefully gave Billie. She’s far more human, and she’s far more someone we would recognize. This is a less ‘babbling’ Winnie. This is a Winnie that understands a little more clearly what’s happened to her at times, but at other times she doesn’t, so you question whether she’s just putting that on, or whether she truly just doesn’t understand.

DDD: Based on her experience playing the part of Winnie in a 1985 Toronto production of ‘Happy Days’, Martha Henry reportedly found the role so arduous that it contributed to her decision to give up acting: ‘Beckett allows no playacting, no attempt to put in something extra to make the lines interesting and funny to the audience. You have to confine yourself to what little he gives you – nothing else exists.’ Do you agree or disagree with Henry’s comment and why?

VA: I disagree with that comment because you could say that about any playwright. Any playwright only gives you the lines; the only difference [with Beckett] is that you don’t get to move around, so sure you don’t get to do a pratfall when you’re saying a funny line. Martha is always surprising us with new humour that we didn’t realize because we’ve heard it so many times and then what she does is she says it in a new way and we’re all laughing our heads off. I think there’s lots of variation, and the more comfortable she gets with Winnie, the more range she finds. And because you’re so limited with Winnie in how she can move, [Martha] starts to do vocal gymnastics, and that becomes her avenue for play.

DDD: Beckett said of ‘Happy Days’: ‘One of the clues of the play is interruption. Something begins; something else begins. She begins but doesn’t carry through with it. She’s constantly being interrupted or interrupting herself. She’s an interrupted being. She’s a bit mad. Manic is not wrong, but too big … A child-woman with a short span of concentration – sure one minute, unsure the next.’ Based on these interruptions inherent to the text, how did you reconcile Winnie’s split between her ‘look on the bright side of life’ philosophy with the harsh reality of her physical predicament?

VA: None of us ever found a problem with that ever because everyone’s in that. The humanity of the play is very obvious to us, I guess because we’ve been thinking and talking about this play for over a year now. Reconciling that dichotomy has never come up; it’s never been a concern. If anything, it leads us in rehearsal to tell stories about our own lives.

DDD: I would like to thank you for your time and the enlightening answers you provided regarding your approach to staging Happy Days.

VA: You’re welcome.