Hypothetical project in The Liverpool Playhouse studio
Role- Set and Costume Designer
Director- Elli Johnson
Written by Samuel Beckett
Set in a post-apocalyptic world where global warming and climate change has caused the sun to fry the Earth. The sand dunes hide years of forgotten waste land, filled with landfill and lumpy in their unnatural appearance. The ground has been churned up and spat out by humanity, oil seeps from the endless landscape and sucks down its victims into the sand.
The sand creeps into the audience, threatening to swallow up anything which remains in its tracks, there’s a sense of timelessness and yet time is running out for Winnie. The mirrors reflect the landscape, adding to its endlessness, isolating the characters even more and adding to the discomfort of the audience as the look on at this uncomfortable scenario.
Here we find Winnie and Willy, the last scraps of humanity, stuck between the 1930s dustbowl in their ashen washed out blues, with rococo eccentricities which embellish their exteriors and yet offer no practical usage. Winnies routine of applying makeup on top of make up has made her almost greasy in appearance, her constant combing is slowly disintegrating her hair and yet she is blind to all of this.
Willie is more of an onlooker, occasionally peering from his newspaper and muttering responses yet not listening directly to anything that is said. He presents himself in a much lesser way, in pants and a shirt throughout. At the end he emerges, dressed immaculately in full suit. It feels almost like an apparition or a dream of Winnies, yet we are left wondering in the end as to whether this endlessness will just continue as the last day.
Blinded by their preoccupation, musing over the past instead of focusing on their current predicament they represent a bleak outlook on the future of humanity and what that means to Beckett.