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Happy Days in the Anthropocene
from Part III - On the Contemporary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2024
Is happiness possible in the Anthropocene? If, as Sarah Ahmed suggests, happiness is the mark of an accommodation with the future, then what becomes of the possibility of happiness when our planetary relation to the future has become estranged?
This essay considers this question, in relation to two performances staged in the summer of 2021, a site specific piece entitled Beckett in Folkestone, and a production of Beckett’s Happy Days, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Riverside Studios.
Both pieces, staged as we were emerging from the Covid lockdown and in the midst of ecological and biopolitical crisis, conduct a forensic examination of how it is possible now to share each other’s lives, enter into collective futures, or look forward, like Beckett’s Winnie, to another happy day.
In reading the pieces together, the essay looks to the imaginative forms in which we can encounter happiness, not as an accommodation with the future, but as the expression of a radical hope.
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