Saturday, 15 February 2014

28 January 2014. Happy Days at the Young Vic



An arresting set with Winnie (Juliet Stevenson) buried in golden sandstone with an outcrop behind her and the hill stretching in front. At suitable moments, shale pattered down from the outcrop. The rendition is, for me, of monumental existential gloom – the need for another to make sense of speaking, and therefore of being?, yet it hardly mattering what is the substance of the relationship – “if you were to die – to speak in the old style – or go away and leave me, then what would I do, what could I do, all day long, I mean between the bell for waking and the bell for sleep?”. The final scene of Willie crawling up towards her dressed in his old-fashioned City suit was one of beautifully conveyed impossibility. Fantastic but rather lost on some of the teens in the audience.

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