Something Magical May Happen.

The piercing sound of a bell ringing heralds Winnie’s speech, a narrative flow precisely timed – like clockwork. Memories of what were allegedly the good old days are interwoven with literary quotes and optimistic preparations – between the idylls, losses and traumatic experiences surface and subside.

Time and again, everything ends with a new, possibly happy day being invoked.

The language specifies the rules of the game and the rituals of what has always been thought, always been done and always been said. Remnants from our everyday lives are as surprising in the play as archaeological finds.

Only playing opens up spaces in which it is possible to remember how it was to be human – until the bell rings again.

Society itself may be long gone, but the influence its processes had on the ‘last couple’, Winnie and Willie, and their bodies is not. What remains is a post-history in which all constraints – but also all possibilities – have been removed. This space of freedom without presuppositions is structured only by the precision and musicality of Beckett’s language.

Sentences are fragments, words and meanings no longer bear any stable relation to one another. Samuel Beckett’s resistance as an artist lies in the radical form he chose, in his refusal to allow his pictures and stories to affirm the world as it had become.

For actors the way that Beckett reduced his plays to the simplest elements is what makes them so difficult. ‘For God’s sake, don’t act!’ Beckett used to demand as a director. ‘If you allow the words to breathe through your body, if you become a conduit,’ according to Billie Whitelaw, who played Winnie in his stage production of Happy Days in 1979, ‘something magical may happen.’ U.M. 2019