Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days has new meaning in the age of climate change

By Fraser Cattini, PhD candidate, Avant-Garde Ireland, University of Liverpool

In Happy Days, one of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s best-known plays, the body of the protagonist Winnie is embedded in a mound of sand or dirt. During the first act, she is buried to above her waist and in the second, she is buried up to her neck.

In the stage directions, Beckett specifies the staging should feature an “expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound”, as well as “blazing light”. This is suggestive of a post-human landscape which has been affected by ecological disaster.

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