Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days has new meaning in the age of climate change

In Happy Days, one of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s best-known plays, the body of the protagonist Winnie is embedded in a mound of sand or dirt. During the first act, she is buried to above her waist and in the second, she is buried up to her neck.

In the stage directions, Beckett specifies the staging should feature an “expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound”, as well as “blazing light”. This is suggestive of a post-human landscape which has been affected by ecological disaster.

Beckett’s works have been labelled absurd, existentialist, modern and postmodern by critics. Yet the setting presented in Happy Days (first performed in 1961) feels uniquely contemporary in our age of ongoing climate crisis.

Born in Dublin in 1906, some of Beckett’s earliest interactions with nature took place on local walks. Often joining his father William on lengthy excursions around the Dublin hills to avoid the religious obligation of Sunday church, these early ambles helped to imprint the landscape on his artistic consciousness. Images from these walks subsequently found their way into a number of his literary works.

Yet it was much later, after Beckett had abandoned a promising academic career to move to Paris and become a writer, that he encountered serious ecological and human destruction.

With the outbreak of the second world war, he joined the French resistance before becoming a member of the ambulance corps, based in the Normandy town of Saint-Lô. As biographer James Knowlson recalls in Damned To Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996), it was here that:

Beckett witnessed real devastation and misery … Possessions blown to pieces; a ward full of patients ill with tuberculosis … People in desperate need of food and clothing, yet clinging desperately onto life; a hospital created out of nothing on fields that became churned into a sea of mud.

My PhD research at the University of Liverpool explores Beckett’s work. The university hosts a biennial festival dedicated to his life and works. The current iteration, Beckett: Lieben 2026, features stagings, musical interpretations, photography, visual art and talks related to Beckett’s experiences in Germany.

Staging Happy Days

First performed 16 years after the end of the war, Happy Days features little sign of human civilisation in the near-empty, barren landscape that the two protagonists Winnie and Willie inhabit.

Winnie shows a desperation to cling on to life despite the constrictions of the mound, shown through her incessant activity. She frequently rummages through her bag, for example, because it is one of her only remaining means of autonomy.

Within the earth that constricts her body, Winnie’s only remaining signs of life are her physical movements and, in the second act, her words. In a contemporary sense, action and communication are vital tools for engaging effectively with our ecological crisis, before the situation worsens and the fiction of Winnie’s environmental collapse becomes a reality.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

During rehearsals of Happy Days at the Royal Court Theatre in 1979, Beckett insisted to the scholar Martha Fehsenfeld that Winnie is “like a bird with oil on its feathers”.

Such an image feels damning in today’s world, where oil spills occur frequently and animals often bear the marks of human ecological irresponsibility. The comment underlines that Winnie’s paralysis is symbolic of how environmental damage affects animals as well as humans.

Rather than placing her in a mound, Katie Mitchell’s 2015 production of the play in Hamburg, Germany situated Winnie in a kitchen, with rising water threatening to engulf her body.

Beckett’s ambiguous setting, in which the rising mound gradually envelops Winnie’s body, echoes other ecological issues – be it the rising water levels which threaten to erode our coastlines, or the rising flames of forest fires which threaten to enclose our trees and kill our biodiversity.

Seeing or reading Happy Days in the light of frequent ecological disasters, audiences are reminded that Winnie’s body is inextricable from the earth in which it is buried – just as human bodies are inseparable from the Earth we inhabit.

Thus, Happy Days serves as a necessary reminder to look after our planet while we still can – if we are to avoid our bodies becoming engulfed by disaster, like Winnie’s.

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Fraser Cattini’s suggestion:

For fans of Happy Days, I would recommend the art of Ana Mendieta (1948-1985). As a Cuban multimedia artist, Mendieta created performances, videos, sculptures and photographs with a particular focus on the relationship between body and landscape. Her works incorporate a range of natural materials such as blood, dirt, moss and feathers.

Her 1974 work Burial Pyramid draws remarkable similarities with Beckett’s aesthetics. In this 3½-minute video, Mendieta is buried beneath a pile of rocks – recalling the pre-Columbian, Indigenous Cuban tradition of honouring and protecting the dead by burying them beneath stones. As the video progresses, the rocks begin to fall away, revealing Mendieta’s naked body enshrouded in dirt.

Mendieta’s performance draws attention to the colonial past of her native Cuba, as well as the mistreatment of women by colonial powers. The relationship between her body and the land in which she is buried becomes an important signifier of heritage, and a vital marker of identity.

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