Conspicuously absent from a recent six-week Beckett Festival run by the Barbican in London and the Gate Theatre in Dublin was the 1961 play Happy Days. It is an important work, with one of the 20th century's most demanding, and for an actress arguably one of the most rewarding, roles, in the form of Winnie, buried in a mound up to her waist in the first half, up to her neck in the second.

Peter Brook has directed the play twice in the past decade, with his wife Natasha Parry as Winnie in a 1997 French production (Oh les beaux jours), then in 2003, in German, as Glückliche Tage, which began in Basel with Miriam Goldschmidt in the lead. This has toured Europe and has, finally, just opened in Berlin. It missed London and Dublin: Beckett might have proved a theatre-emptier when done in German in English-speaking lands, even when this fundamentally bright, witty play is staged by one of Britain's most famous directors.