Sydney Theatre Company Artistic Director Mitchell Butel reflects on this classic work of drama: Happy Days.

So, here’s the thing about Beckett from my point of view…  

I studied Waiting for Godot at high school and I DID NOT GET IT.  

Why were these two men endlessly complaining and why did they seem to also take such delight in their misery?  

Our class was taken to a torturous amateur production with actors barely older than us (and with, let’s just say, limited skill sets) playing Vladimir and Estragon which only made matters worse.  

But when I turned forty and found myself with knees and bones ravaged by time, I saw Andrew Upton’s terrific production with Richard Roxburgh and Hugo Weaving and I suddenly understood – while death/Godot/nothing approaches, there is so much comedy to be had in the patterns and inevitability of our collective and individual decline. We may not all swap hats like vaudevillians to fill the hours but we find other routines simultaneously banal and joyous, full of meaning and yet empty as well.  

I had seen and much enjoyed Ruth Cracknell playing Winnie for STC in 1991 in Simon Phillips’ production. That I got more than Godot and not just because I was now in my early twenties! There was something pathetic and sad but also sweet and often hilarious in her sunny optimism and ruminations, in the midst of being trapped in a mound of earth that only grew around her.  

All of our feet start to sink into the earth at some point and Beckett holds a masterful torch to show us that we’re not Robinson Crusoe in feeling strange that we can feel gratitude and dread and joy and fear and regret and hope all at once as we progress from six feet over to under.  

Is Winnie facing the music, diverting herself from it or feeling it and facing it in harmony? Either way, there is such grace and marvel in how she deals with it:  

“That is what I find so wonderful, that not a day goes by.... hardly a day, without some addition to one's knowledge however trifling, the addition I mean, provided one takes the pains.” 

Speaking of grace and the marvellous, what a thrill to have the truly brilliant Pamela Rabe back on the Sydney Theatre Company stage and to realise this production. She has been a key and acclaimed artist for STC since appearing in The Ham Funeral in 1989 by Patrick White (an Antipodean Beckett in some senses) and I, like many, have been enthralled and dazzled by every performance she has given since.  

Equally and always dazzling has been the prolific work of theatre maker, this production’s co-realiser and design extraordinaire Nick Schlieper who has probably worked on more shows at the STC than any other artist and is of course, now represented on Broadway for his phenomenal contribution to The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

Joined by the gifted and lovely Markus Hamilton (recently seen in Sweat) as Willie and supported by a sterling creative team, I know you’ll be once more captured by the magic and mirth they are making on the mound in the midst of mortality. (Beckett liked a bit of word play too, so forgive me for the nod.) Enjoy.  

Photo: Markus Hamilton, Pamela Rabe and Nick Schlieper, by Brett Boardman