"Wait for the happy day to come when flesh melts at so many degrees and the night of the moon has so many hundred hours."
Winnie
Cover
Alternate Cover
The main idea for the set
Beckett gives quite explicit instructions for the construction of the set: a central mount, scorched earth, open barren fields and sky, with a focus on clarity and simplicity. Winnie sheltered and entombed within the mount, functions as a symbol for the Womb and the Grave.
Holding on to these basic tenets, I tried to reinterpret the scenery in order to visually animate what struck me as Winnie’s essential character. Free flowing sand is enclosed within hard plexi-glass cubicles, just as Winnies free-floating rumblings and reminiscences, are structured by her obsessive everyday rituals. Sand also functions as a symbol of Time and Death into which Winnie slowly sinks, whilst the plastic cubicles manifest Winnies isolation and loneliness, even from her husband. Following Beckett’s original instructions, Winnie is placed off-center. The whole arrangement of the cubicles is meant to resemble both barren land and a modern day city-landscape, with apartment buildings and skyscrapers, further accentuating the basic dimension of isolation.
An antique gold-gilded frame, with a video projection of an idyllic sky, exploit common visual notions of happiness in order to reference the title of the play; and try to combine old and new, as Winnie herself survives by living the present through her memories. All the props used for her daily routines are vintage, expensive objects, worn-out relics of a past life.
Costumes
