By John Shand
When the celebrated actor Pamela Rabe was first approached to play Winnie, the central character in Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, she had to think about it. Winnie, you see, is not for the faint-hearted. Buried up to her waist in the first act and up to her neck in the second, and clinging to life with almost insane optimism, she constitutes one of most revered and challenging roles in theatre. So, was she not on Rabe’s bucket list?
Pamela Rabe stars in Happy Days.Credit: Wolter Peeters
“Definitely not!” the actor shoots back.
“Do you want to think about that?” Nick Schlieper, the acclaimed lighting and set designer, asks jokingly. He joins Rabe for this interview in Sydney Theatre Company’s offices because when she ultimately accepted the role, she asked Schlieper to co-direct the play with her – an exercise that’s more hat-stacking than hat-swapping.
Why had she not been keen to do it?
“Because it’s terrifying,” Rabe says. “People talk about it being the kind of female Hamlet. I think, well, Jesus, in Hamlet there’s at least another 12 people on the stage. In this one I’ve just got lovely Markus Hamilton [playing Winnie’s dysfunctional, almost silent husband Willie] and I can’t even really see him!”
Markus Hamilton, Pamela Rabe and director Nick Schlieper collaborate in the STC’s production of Happy Days.Credit: Brett Boardman
That’s because the boater-wearing Willie lives in a hole to the rear of the mound in which Winnie, for reasons that are never explained, is partially buried. Beckett’s 1961 masterpiece fuses high comedy, absurdism, existentialism and heartbreak, and the role of Winnie is certainly confronting and demanding. Not only is there what’s essentially a 90-minute monologue to learn, but more than a third of the text comes in the form of precise and sometimes repetitive stage directions, largely to do with Winnie’s facial expressions and the contents of her handbag – and that’s before we get to the physical and psychological rigours of being constrained within a mound.
Yet, despite stage directions that seemingly make it intensely prescriptive, every production engenders a unique incarnation of Winnie, and across the years many notable actors have performed her. These include Jessica Tandy, Billie Whitelaw, Irene Worth, Felicity Kendall, Ruth Cracknell, Maxine Peake, Julie Forsyth, Judith Lucy and Belinda Giblin.
“One of the things that has really pleasantly surprised me,” says Schlieper, “is that as you really start to forensically investigate this text – something that at first blush appears slightly surreal, somewhat absurd, full of non sequiturs and difficult to find a thread through – it starts to feel utterly understandable and utterly human. So the thing that appears to be prescriptive, once you understand how normal and human what’s spoken actually is, it’s amazing that, without dishonouring any of those stage directions, they start to on the one hand feel quite logical, and on the other, quite flexible. You can bend them an awfully long way to suit any given interpretation without breaking them.”
When asked to take on the play by ex-STC artistic director Kip Williams, Rabe ultimately agreed because she saw Happy Days as a perfect opportunity to implement a way of working that had long been on her mind. “I’ve always been looking for opportunities to break down that kind of formal, slightly patriarchal hierarchy that often invades rehearsal rooms,” she says. She points to the nature of the play – Beckett’s strong presence via the stage directions; Winnie’s physical restraint, yet verbal domination – and adds, “So this became a really great opportunity to break that mould a little bit.”
Markus Hamilton and Pamela Rabe in rehearsals for the STC’s production of Happy Days.Credit: Brett Boardman
What she sought was for the process to be “a democratic collaboration of souls and minds in the room”. Those other souls and minds include Hamilton as Willie, sound designer Stefan Gregory, costume designer Mel Page, assistant director Kenneth Moraleda, stage management and even the workshop staff who have built and then painstakingly adapted the Schlieper-designed mound.
Although best known as an actor (most recently in Belvoir’s August: Osage County), Rabe has directed several productions across the years. For Schlieper, by contrast, it’s a job he’d studiously avoided since he was about 21 – until Rabe approached him to share the role this time, when he says it “felt like all the stars aligned”.
“We have a long history of collaboration,” observes Rabe. “Having been in so many rehearsal processes with Nick, where he has been the lighting designer and I have been an actor, I have relied on his eyes and ears in all of those processes as well. So I think there has been a long gestation of trust, and this just felt like a logical continuation.”
She further notes that Schlieper’s never been one to stay inside his design-oriented box: “Nick is the person everybody goes to because he will always have a holistic response to the work that’s been created.”
“It’s a nice way of saying a nightmare backseat driver,” Schlieper quips.
‘There are a lot of messages available to her that this is not particularly going to end well, but she just keeps on going.’
Pamela Rabe on her character, Winnie
“Yeah, and I have a reputation as being a nightmare backseat director whenever I’m an actor, too,” Rabe fires back. “But we’re both people who really get excited, intrigued and stimulated by thinking about the whole of anything, and have invigorating conversations around all that.”
Rabe describes Happy Days as a “fiendish” text to learn, the trick being to unearth, beneath the surface surreality, the deep human undercurrent epitomised by Winnie’s resilience and her rituals. Rehearsals have been a daunting but singular experience for her: “Working at it and trying to crack it … Finding the connection to it and the humanity. And the exhilaration of what technically is being asked of one is an extraordinary privilege: challenging, terrifying, wonderful.”
Asked what she likes most about her character, Rabe replies that she admires that Winnie “has to work so hard to suck every bit of life out of everything around her and everything within her … I love it that she’s so resourceful. There are a lot of messages available to her that this is not particularly going to end well, but she just keeps on going.”
Pamela Rabe rehearsing in her mound in the STC’s production of Happy Days.Credit: Brett Boardman
One might think claustrophobia could be an issue, particularly when Rabe is up to her neck in the mound in the shorter second act. “This is something,” says Schlieper, “that I have apparently been much more concerned about than Pam – unless she’s telling me massive lies! I am not prone to claustrophobia, but when I think about being trapped for half an hour like that I think I might suddenly discover what claustrophobia is all about. One of the reasons it’s been so great to have the set in the room so much of the time [the workshop having built it by the second week of rehearsals] is working out every possible degree of creature comfort for Pam to at least soften the hardship of being trapped inside that thing.”
“We’re not talking about mini-bars or heated seats!” clarifies Rabe. “All of which have popped up in jokes. More than anything, I’ve found that it’s been about having the right degree of restriction because if I’m just free-floating in there it becomes very hard to feel what Winnie’s constriction is. It’s actually finding the level of that restriction of movement and then making sure that that’s something that can be sustained, by softening rough edges and having something that’s ergonomic, so you can actually repeat it eight times a week and be in it for hours.”
In fact, Rabe has been asking for more constraint, not less, despite the inevitable discomfort. “It makes the job easier,” she explains. “For the duration of the hour-and-a-half when she’s in that mound it is actually really helpful to be very constricted and somewhat uncomfortable.”
An unusual aspect of this production is that there will be no interval between the two acts: rather, a blackout in which the mound is altered to come up to Rabe’s neck inside 30 seconds – a design and manufacturing challenge of its own. Schlieper says it felt counterintuitive to him to “let people off the hook” and stroll out into the real world for 20 minutes. He points out that Beckett’s earliest drafts presented the work as a one-act play, and he thinks their little blackout serves both Beckett’s ironclad intentions and their own desires.
Neither Schlieper nor Rabe care to buy into the various metaphorical explanations for Winnie’s predicament, which have ranged wildly from post-apocalypse to childhood trauma to, most improbably, the afterlife. Schlieper says that one of the primary changes across Beckett’s eight drafts of the play was his “stripping away any degree of specificity; any hints as to how this happened … leaving you with a very pure metaphor for anybody who is trapped in a life that is not of their own choosing”.
Rabe believes trying to explain the piece does it a disservice; that the ideal is to create a canvas on which audience members can paint their own interpretations if they so desire. As Schlieper says, “It’s fabulously slippery stuff.”
Happy Days, Wharf 1 Theatre, until May 11.
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