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Title: Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0-8021-3076-3 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: November, 1983 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.83 (6 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Classic, Schmlassic.
Comment: Even though I consider myself fairly versed in theatre, I have to say that "Happy Days" fails to resonate. Granted Beckett is out there, but he accomplished far greater things with the sublimely ridiculous "Waiting For Godot."
"Happy Days" seems to wander around like a freshman who doesn't know what class he/she wants. Looking for absurdist theatre? You're much better off with Ionesco's "Bald Soprano."
Rating: 4
Summary: Beckett's most usefully truthful play.
Comment: So often Beckett's philosophical 'universality' seems like an excuse not to confront genuine dilemmas head on. 'Happy Days' is his most tangible work, a grim portrait of a marriage, where a wife is buried up to her waist/waste in a repetitious living death, trying to avoid confronting the reality of her situation, the brutish indifference of her husband, the incremental inevitability of life only getting worse.
Winnie is Beckett's most sympathetic character because she is the one we are the most likely to meet - she is aware of the hopelessness of her situation, but what can she do? Concentrate on something else - how many of us do better? The dissatisfaction most people have with the play presumably lies with the stage directions which interrupt the monologue every couple of words, rendering a fluid, rhythmic read impossible (like Beckett was ever easy). Instead of complaining, go and see it in a theatre, where words and gesture combine to moving effect, even when the language is at its most insistently ironic and playful (and it's very funny too, but don't they always say that about Beckett?). It certainly made me ashamed of the way I treat my wife.
Rating: 5
Summary: Happiness in small things
Comment: Reading through the reviews here, I am absolutely bewildered as to how anybody could find this play intolerable or (even worse) dull. I am not one of these people that adore every word that Beckett ever wrote; I have severe reservations about some of the later minimalist pieces such as 'Breathe', but 'Happy Days' is one of the most concise and fully realised portraits of the human condition in modern drama. 'Waiting for Godot' is just playful and clever; this is sublime and intellectually adept, combining the structural rigidity of 'Not I' with the fluidity of existential ideas that proliferated throughout all his work. While this is not my favourite play of his, that is entirely due to a personal preference for 'Endgame' - there is nothing tangible that really lets it down.
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Title: Endgame and Act Without Words by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802150241 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: July, 1970 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Collected Shorter Plays by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802150551 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: October, 1984 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802130348 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: August, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Last Night of Ballyhoo by Alfred Uhry ISBN: 1559361409 Publisher: Theatre Communications Group Pub. Date: December, 1997 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh ISBN: 0822216647 Publisher: Dramatist's Play Service Pub. Date: December, 1998 List Price(USD): $6.50 |
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