Happy Days, The Young Vic

The celebrated stage and screen actress Juliet Stevenson will reprise one of the greatest roles written by Samuel Beckett, Winnie, next Spring.
As well as her award-winning turns on stage, Stevenson is a familiar face from big and small screen appearances in the likes of Truly, Madly, Deeply, Emma and The Hour. The role of Winnie might be her most surreal acting challenge to date, though. The protagonist of Beckett’s play is buried, for reasons that are never explained, in a mound of earth, unable to move and relentlessly wakened from her sleep by the ringing of a bell. Her only companion in this purgatorial state is her husband Willie, whom she fears will leave her and fulfil her terror of being alone.
Happy Days is a typically strange Beckett offering, with hints of apocalypse and deadly stasis. The incessantly chattering and determinedly optimistic Winnie is an exciting prospect for an actress, and Stevenson follows in an illustrious line of big names who have played this lead, from Peggy Ashcroft and Fiona Shaw to Billie Whitelaw, one of Beckett’s foremost collaborators during his lifetime, for whom he wrote a number of his plays.
The Young Vic’s associate director, Natalie Abrahami, is directing this production. In 2005 she successfully grappled with Beckett’s Play and Not I (currently part of the Beckett Trilogy at the Duchess Theatre)  at Battersea Arts Centre .