Questions for Deborah Warner, director of Happy Days (Jan 8—Feb 2), from Susan Yung, BAM Publications.

Susan Yung: Other than the obvious inability to walk around, what are the demands of acting in the positions Fiona Shaw (Winnie) is put in?

Deborah Warner: Happy Days is one of the toughest texts I've ever worked on. I think Fiona and I both had our troubles, but for her being buried up to her waist and then to her neck were the least of her difficulties! Thanks to Tom Pye's extraordinary installation of a set she doesn't have to act that part of the evening. The text is notoriously hard to learn, packed as it is with half-finished thought and interruption. It is on one level a poem of fragments, a symphony of interrupted thought made out of shards of consciousness, shreds of memory, chips of half forgotten things—a torn memory; always partial, always stopped. You have to learn the text as a musician does a piece of music to even start the deeper work. It made for a very frustrating rehearsal period but (like a piece of music) it is now an incredible joy to play. It was only really at the first performance that we understood what had to be done. Comedy needs an audience and a part of Happy Days is very, very funny. What part that is—the audience tells us.

Fiona is an extremely physical performer and so we used to play badminton in our breaks in rehearsal to keep the energy high. It's one thing sitting in the mound for the duration of the performance—only 80 minutes—another being there for a ten hour rehearsal day. At first the restraints both physical and textual felt frustrating, but in time the bonds became freeing. The super challenge of this work is to inhabit fully each broken thought and then, in turn, the silence beyond. Huge mental and vocal dexterity is demanded. Fiona illuminated The Waste Land for me and so many others, and with Happy Days she has made sense and delight of a play that I thought I would never fully understand.

Yung: How has the production evolved since its opening?

Warner: This is such a radical play—a scripted conversation between performer and audience. With no "action," nothing on that level to experience and observe, the audience find themselves sliding into a dialogue with Winnie just as if they had come across her in her desert. Unlike Willie (her husband) the audience actually become the other side of the conversation. Her fear is that she is not being heard and the brilliance of the theatrical conceit is that we hear her, we become her comfort and yet we are not there... Like stand-up comedy the piece needs an audience to begin to exist and there are times when the event feels as far from conventional theater as improvised jazz. It feels very contemporary, very exciting, as if it were written yesterday, not 45 years ago. It's true to say that it is completely different every night and will be hugely affected by the make-up of the audience. Since August we have played to audiences in Epidavros, Greece; Paris, France; Madrid, Spain, and most recently Washington, DC. I like to believe that each performance carries the flavors of the best of those past evenings within it.

Yung: What's your take on Beckett's emphasis on female character, including Winnie?

Warner: Like Hamlet, Winnie takes us beyond gender to a place of universal experience. Her ancestry is in line with the great classical heroines and while Clytemnestra, Phaedra, and Hedda Gabler might find cousin Winnie a trifle eccentric, they would certainly recognize her predicament. Unlike her ancestors she takes us to a very modern place—beyond language to silence.

Yung: I read that Tom Pye (set designer) would not be surprised if people linked the set to Iraq and global warming. What do you think the comparable analogies would have been to Beckett at the time he wrote it?

Warner: Winnie is stuck—she is going nowhere and that is what Beckett wants us to think when we look at her. Tom never claimed global warming credits for his set although some critics mentioned it. Others did not. That's fine. The play's canvas is vast and the whole experience of watching it will mean different things to different people. Beckett's greatness is that the piece is bigger than the moment in which it was written and like all great work it looks backwards as well as forwards. We are in the process of testing the work of the past century and time will tell if this is or is not a classic. When an old work work causes contemporary parallels to be drawn within the imagination of an audience, all the signs are set for an enduring history.

Yung: What is your mood after you watch this play?

Warner: Up! Winnie will not let you down. She is a lovely person.