Lots of us know Beckett’s famous words from The Unnameable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” This is tragicomic; but it’s also arrived-at, accounted-for. Whatever else he’s doing, the character who says this is definitely thinking it also. In Deborah Warner’s brilliant production of Beckett’s Happy Days, the central character, Winnie, played by Fiona Shaw, does as little thinking as possible. Instead we get a more domestic tragicomedy, one that we can recognise more as part of our own everyday happy days. Because the play’s strength is to see that our normal way of life is more like the inverse of Beckett’s famous formula: “I’ll go on! (I can’t go on.)”
It gets less Fintan O'Toole-like after that. I go on to give the impression that I went to the play.
