Happy Days

"Jacobs simply commands the stage with a lustily theatrical and fearlessly physical performance"
- Globe and Mail

Samuel Beckett wrote, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Theatre Columbus takes him at his word and has created the funniest production of his play Happy Days you are likely to see.”
- Eye Weekly

Stuck in the ground, a woman goes on with her "Happy Day" with indefatigable hopeless human spirit, despite being pulled into the earth. A drawing room comedy in desperate, desolate circumstance.

Winnie as a role, is as coveted and challenging to an actor as playing Hamlet. Its on every virtuoso's "list".

"Jacobs is nearly flawless -- with superb comic exaggeration of a sad clown, funny and sad at the same time, making her all the more pitiable."
-Denis Armstrong, Sun Media, Ottawa.

"Cherniak obviously set the bar high with this NAC production"
- The Ottawa Citizen

In Armstrong's year end wrap up, he picked the National Arts Centre's HAPPY DAYS as the best to take the Ottawa stage in 2008.

Written by Samuel Beckett
Starring Tanja Jacobs and John Jarvis
Directed by Leah Cherniak

Lights by Jock Munro
Set and Costume by Victoria Wallace
Sound by Thomas Ryder Payne
Stage Management by Robert Harding, assisted by Laura Baxter

Directors Notes

The opening image of Happy Days is what we will look at for the entire play: Winnie, stuck up to her “diddies” in a mound of scorched earth. Horrible and hilarious. It is almost impossible to categorize Beckett, but the tragic/comic nature of his plays have always compelled me; the meeting ground of both laughter and desolation. This is the territory of true clown.

Beckett has an extraordinary sense of humour. It’s often dark humour, but it is inspired from his love of the low comedy charm and skills of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. There is much to be found of these silent film stars in Happy Days. The characters’ names are Winnie and Willie. (Willy-nilly? A dancing vaudeville team? The countless innuendos of their names.) Winnie has the clown’s dilemma: she cannot leave the stage. Beckett’s plays are unlike any others and defy comparison. He does not place his characters in a historical or recognizable setting. They exist in an unfamiliar place: an essential environment that has no decoration or familiar landmarks. All that is inessential is stripped away so that the play is like an event happening in a theatre in front of an audience. An audience is always more or less aware that they are in a theatre and Beckett doesn’t conceal but confronts this by weaving it into the fabric of the play. Perhaps this is to compel the audience to generate the “meaning” of the play.

“I want neither to instruct nor to improve nor to keep people from getting bored. I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which has been through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space... There are no easy solutions.”
—Samuel Beckett

Happy Days is like a poem, a piece of music about time, memory, happiness, solitude, suffering and salvation. A song of the human spirit. I hope you enjoy it.
Leah Cherniak

HAPPY DAYS is presented by special arrangement with
SAMUEL FRENCH, INC.

Sponsorship and funding provided by