Happy Days review, Beckett’s bewitching heroine buries her existential fears

Pitlochry Festival theatre In what feels now like a premonition of the climate crisis, Siobhán Redmond is compelling as the everywoman putting on a brave face in an unforgiving landscape

S amuel Beckett’s play is always staged with a radiant brightness. It is hot enough to set a parasol alight. If, on its premiere in 1961, that resonated with audience anxieties about nuclear Armageddon, in 2026, it feels like a premonition of the climate crisis. Is this how it ends?

Emma Bailey’s set is a dune of bleached-white sand, clumps of sea grass forcing their way through into a scorched environment, baked by Colin Grenfell’s lighting. When Forbes Masson crawls out of his hole as Willie, keeping his back to us, he reveals nothing more than his neck and shoulders, raw and sunburnt, his scarred head protected by a handkerchief (used).

Not that Siobhán Redmond would admit to such discomfort. As Winnie, she is irrepressibly cheery, a woman incapable of entertaining a negative thought without batting it back with a positive spin. Even when she talks about a “black night without end” in a second half of even greater bleakness, she maintains a genteel smile and a twinkle in her eyes.

By that point, twinkle is pretty much all her eyes can do. Buried deep and then deeper still in this unforgiving landscape, she is deprived of movement and not totally unwillingly: Willie’s carnal grunts are uncouth, humanity at its most base and fundamental, where she is all bodiless elegance. She needs him as an audience, an actor is nothing if she is not seen and heard, but is faintly alarmed by his physical presence.

With eyeshadow to match her turquoise ballgown, her crystal earrings and black fascinator in check, even if her blonde bob is dishevelled, she is a figure in denial of her circumstances. She would never mention the arrival of a migraine, but celebrates its passing with elan, an everywoman putting on a brave face in preference to existential despair.

Showing tremendous vocal range, from girlish singsong to notes of dark resonance, Redmond is compelling in Roxana Silbert’s carefully controlled production. In a play that lands somewhere between the time-watching of Waiting for Godot and the mutual dependency of Endgame , she is a bewitching metaphor for the futility of existence and the urgency to carry on regardless.