In Happy Days, one of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s best-known plays, the body of the protagonist Winnie is embedded in a mound of sand or dirt. During the first act, she is buried to above her waist and in the second, she is buried up to her neck.

In the stage directions, Beckett specifies the staging should feature an “expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound”, as well as “blazing light”. This is suggestive of a post-human landscape which has been affected by ecological disaster.

Beckett’s works have been labelled absurd, existentialist, modern and postmodern by critics. Yet the setting presented in Happy Days (first performed in 1961) feels uniquely contemporary in our age of ongoing climate crisis.

Born in Dublin in 1906, some of Beckett’s earliest interactions with nature took place on local walks. Often joining his father William on lengthy excursions around the Dublin hills to avoid the religious obligation of Sunday church, these early ambles helped to imprint the landscape on his artistic consciousness. Images from these walks subsequently found their way into a number of his literary works.

Yet it was much later, after Beckett had abandoned a promising academic career to move to Paris and become a writer, that he encountered serious ecological and human destruction.

With the outbreak of the second world war, he joined the French resistance before becoming a member of the ambulance corps, based in the Normandy town of Saint-Lô. As biographer James Knowlson recalls in Damned To Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996), it was........

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