Janusz Pyda OP: Happy Days – if we discount the two Dramatic Fragments, abandoned drafts written at the end of the 1950s and not published until the mid-1970s – is Beckett's first dramatic work after Krapp's Last Tape. Despite obvious differences, I can discern some similarities between the two. First of all, Happy Days was, like Krapp, initially written in English and only later translated by Beckett into French. Secondly, both consist almost exclusively of monologues, although in addition to the main protagonist of Happy Days, Winnie, there is another character, Willie, to whom Winnie mostly addresses herself and who is occasionally given a few lines to say in response. Finally, there are, despite all appearances to the contrary, certain similarities in the stage setting. In both cases we have a stage set that is half realistic, half allegorical. In Krapp we have a man sitting at a table in a room, presumably his study, but at the same time he is in an abstract space, divided into areas of bright light and impenetrable darkness. In Happy Days we have two people in a desert landscape of sand dunes under a bright, sunny sky (as if on a beach), but here, too, the landscape seems not quite natural; there is something artificial about it. Does the dual nature of the world presented on stage indicate that here, too, we will be dealing with two levels of meaning?

Antoni Libera: Certainly. But there's also an important difference. You're right to say that the stage setting in both plays, although ostensibly realistic, is in some measure artificial. But the artificiality in Happy Days goes much deeper. In Krapp it is achieved exclusively through the use of light, which plucks the protagonist from his ordinary surroundings – his ‘den’ in the stage directions – and places him in an abstract space where the only things of significance are the words spoken, the relation between speaker and listener, and the tape recorder, which in addition to its primary function as the source of the voice also functions as an indicator of historical time.