The happy days

The company La Santa (Happy End, I want to be a girl Almodóvar), together with the director Álvaro Viguera and the actress Antonia Santa María, take on the powerful challenge of bringing to stage the play written in English by the Irish playwright and narrator Samuel Beckett.

Happy Days presents a striking and metaphorical visual image: Winnie, a middle-aged woman, appears half-buried in a mound of earth under a blinding light. In the first act, she is buried up to her waist. In the second act, the earth reaches up to his neck. Despite her physical paralysis and the desert environment, Winnie maintains a constant monologue, performing daily rituals with the objects in her bag (a toothbrush, a revolver, a mirror) to convince herself that this is, indeed, a happy day.

The play explores the human ability to adapt and find reasons for joy even in the most absolute tragedy. At its premiere, at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York, on September 17, 1961, Beckett was extremely meticulous with the editing. Unlike other works where there is freedom of action, here the stage directions are precise to the second and the centimeter. The author wanted the movement (or lack thereof), the silences and the rhythm of the monologue to capture the viewer in a kind of emotional vertigo.

In the words of Mario Vargas Llosa, "the strength of the work does not lie in the action (which is null), but in the combination of rhythms, images and that strange mixture of humor, nostalgia and tenderness that emanates from Winnie as she disappears underground."

Director Álvaro Viguera | Dramaturgy Samuel Beckett | Company La Santa