I wonder what Samuel Beckett would have thought of the pandemic. Surely he would have smiled at the sight of an all-masked audience watching one of his plays – especially one called Happy Days – from socially distanced chairs. Beckett completed the English version of Happy Days in May 1961, so Trevor Nunn’s staging of the play at The Riverside Studios in Hammersmith marks its 60th anniversary.

What an extraordinary play it is. Winnie, encased in the earth up to her waist in Act 1, and up to her neck in Act 2, speaks into the void, compelled to communicate and longing to be heard. Her monologue, punctuated occasionally by comments and groans from Willie (mostly hidden by the mound in which Winnie is held), is a stream of memories, prayers, and snatches of song and poetry. As with all Beckett’s work, you’re left wondering. Is Winnie’s plight a statement about despair and helplessness, or is it a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of nothingness and meaninglessness? Probably both.

It felt so good to be back in a theatre and to see such a remarkable staging of what is a classic of the modern canon. Even in conditions as strange as these, perhaps especially in conditions as strange as these, no one is better than Beckett on the essentials of human existence.