Some will know her from her turns in films like Crackerjack and Bad Eggs, but Happy Days feels like an exhilarating, scary return to being a theatre student. Lucy grew up wanting to be an actor, but for “a very unfortunate phase of wanting to be a nun”. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning (Rehearsals, not the Botox.) “There are times where you decide you need to be challenged and when you’re actually being challenged, you don’t want to be.” “It is like when I had Botox injected into my vagina – minutes beforehand, I go: what was I thinking? I am really enjoying it,” she hastens to add. Then I started rehearsals and realised I was out of my fucking mind.” There was some part of me that clicked when I read it.
“It is about a woman in her 50s, it is about ageing. “It was written in 1961, but feels like it’s very across climate change,” Lucy says of Happy Days. In 2020 she made an excellent podcast, Overwhelmed and Living, which saw her she stare down everything that frightened her: the news, being single, climate change, ageing, death. There was something in Happy Days that called to a woman in her mid 50s who was figuring out, for the first time, what made her happy who was scared by what was happening in the world and who was, in her own way, trying to do something to make things better. “It makes me even crosser because he was a drunk Irish philanderer, like my father, but the guy knew how string two sentences together. “I get a little tired of straight white men being called geniuses but I think in Beckett’s case, it’s probably true,” Lucy says. “And I thought who would cope with that and go down singing?” Beckett said.
Beckett once said he wrote the play after picturing the “most dreadful thing that could happen to anybody” – like, say, being buried to your neck under an unrelenting sun, with no way out. It is almost a one-woman show, in which Winnie is buried to her waist, then neck, all the while determinedly staying optimistic. Lucy is about start a six-week run playing Winnie in Happy Days, a role that has been labelled “ Hamlet for women”.
“Considering that one of the reasons I retired from standup was the anxiety, I feel like a fucking idiot,” she adds. She gestures almost helplessly at herself, at the sky, at everything, with panic in those large pale eyes. “So I’m not going to stop performing – hence putting myself through this nightmare.” I feel like if you don’t keep evolving as a person, and maybe as an artist – fucking hell, I’m in the middle of saying maybe one of the most pretentious things I’ve ever said – what’s the point?” she says. “I just don’t want to crack jokes for the sake of cracking jokes any more.
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