Seite 91 [91]
ANITA RÁKÓCZY
and shoot herself with the comb. Meanwhile, the car begins its slow descent
down the slope of the mound [...], it bumps into something somewhere and it
stops, but the music continues to play.”°
Tompa touches the core of Happy Days with the fresh, unusual directorial
approach of depicting Winnie in a state of agnosia, having her mix up the
objects that are so familiar to her, that help her through the days from one
bell-ring to the next. She lives in automatisms, conducting pre-composed
choreographies of rummaging things out of her bag and putting them back
again when the time comes. In this scene, with clarity and simplicity, Tompa
raises the question of what would happen if suddenly (or gradually) these
preserving automatisms collapsed. What remains when, because of a small
mistake or two — for example, picking up the Browning instead of the
toothpaste — Winnie can no longer trust her own cognitive abilities, her last
“road marks,” and the whole system crashes? The music unstoppably coming
from the broken-down Rolls Royce, with its ceaseless merriment, is a sharp
counterpoint to Winnie’s decay. It could sound in the living room of a content
middle-class housewife, heralding that “all is good” when nothing is, although
Winnie tries her best to take no notice of it. It is poignant to see how hard she
fights to remain on the surface; she even refrains from opening her bag too
often for the objects that give her a sense of security. Tompa deprives her of
the very means of holding herself together.
Happy Days, Tompa’s first encounter with Beckett, was a lively, courageous
production, governed by strong images and a bold attitude of admittedly
“fully discarding”! the author’s stage instructions. Tompa explains that
it took him some years to realize, during an AEA master course in the US
(Wilma Theatre, Philadelphia, 1992) where he directed Rebecca Olsen in the
role of Winnie — she was one of Joseph Chaikin’s actresses, an older woman
this time, from whose lips Beckett’s lines sounded differently — that Happy
Days is not a play about rebellion, but its exact opposite: cheerfulness and
artless optimism.”
Ibid., 190. Tompa later used this motif in his Philadelphia and Barcelona directions of Happy
Days.
1° Ibid., 190.
Joseph Chaikin, actor, director, and founder of Open Theatre. Chaikin collaborated with Samuel
Beckett and Sam Shepard, and staged their works in the Joseph Papp Public Theatre, Yale
Repertory, the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Mark Taper Forum, and several other theatres.
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/nyregion/joseph-chaikin-67-actor-and-innovative¬
director.html (accessed 29 April 2017).
12 Ichim: Tompa Gabor, 189.
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