Theatre reviews: Happy Days | Antigone

Happy Days, Pitlochry Festival Theatre ★★★★★

Antigone, Tron Theatre, Glasgow ★★★★

Death is the subject, in both Samuel Beckett’s postwar masterpiece Happy Days, and Sophocles’s 2,500-year-old drama Antigone. Yet just as we often need the awareness of death to make us feel fully alive, so these two plays are among the most vibrant and intense in the whole theatre repertoire, fairly blazing with energy and presence; and that’s certainly true of Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s unforgettable revival of Happy Days, directed by Roxana Silbert in Pitlochry’s studio theatre, fiercely designed and lit by Emma Bailey and Colin Grenfell, and featuring two absolute stars of Scottish theatre in Siobhan Redmond and Forbes Masson.

Born of the postwar years when the nuclear threat dominated political debate, Happy Days is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape where the sun blazes down on burning sand, and life seems all but extinguished.

Our heroine Winnie is still here, though; a middle-aged woman buried up to her waist, and then to her neck, in a mound of sand, but still dressed as if for a cocktail party, and gallantly determined to have a lovely day of it. Also present, in occasional back-view glimpses, is her husband Willie; less trapped, still able crawl about a little, but much more despairing, and only infrequently inclined to respond to Winnie’s cheerful monologue at all.

And the point about this minimal masterpiece of Beckett’s is that in 90 short minutes, it not only encompasses all our fears about general human extinction - nuclear annihilation then, devastating climate change now - but becomes a most magnificent metaphor for the whole business of how human beings somehow carry on, despite the full knowledge of our own inevitable, and probably painful, ageing and death.

It’s a paradox so perfectly observed and captured here, that it seems almost any thinking human being would find, in this single drama, almost everything they have ever felt about life, death, and the meaning of it all. And it almost goes without saying that Redmond and Masson are a truly sublime Winnie and Willie; she tackling one of the toughest texts in the repertoire with grace, humour, a steely underlying realism, and a beautiful, heartbreaking fragility to which she cannot give in - and he the perfect foil to her avalanche of talk, silent, desperate, often unresponsive, but present, right to the end.

Like Happy Days, Antigone is a mighty classic of great outward simplicity. It tells the story of two sisters - Antigone and Ismene, daughters of Oedipus and his own mother Jocasta - whose brother Polyneices has just staged a rebel war against their city’s current ruler, their uncle Creon; and has been not only defeated and killed, but - as a warning - left out on the battlefield to rot in public view.

The older sister, Antigone, reacts with fury to this ruling of Creon’s, and resolves to bury Polyneices, even at the cost of her life. The younger sister, Ismene, is appalled, begging Antigone to back down, and to choose life; and in Lulu Raczka’s brilliant 2020 version of the drama - now playing at the Tron in an electrifying and visually stunning new production by Finn Den Hertog - the play is stripped back to the bare essentials of this domestic confrontation between two sisters.

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Played with tremendous intensity by rising stars Eilidh Loan and Holly Howden Gilchrist, the two sisters therefore play bullying drinking games, sing karaoke numbers together (Can’t Live, If Living Is Without You), and fight, both verbally and physically. The fact of Antigone’s fatal decision of course cuts through this teenage world like a knife, raising huge questions about what could possibly be worth such a total sacrifice.

And if Raczka’s version inevitably loses all intensity after Antigone’s death, it still leaves space for a telling meditation, beautifully delivered by Howden Gilchrist, on how and whether Ismene’s long life can achieve any meaning at all, once it falls under the shadow of such a huge act of courage, and of irredeemable loss.

Happy Days at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, and Antigone at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, both run until 10 October.

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