Of course, stasis is not just an idea central to Beckett’s play – as Winnie natters away with a kind of ferocious optimism all while buried up to her waist, and eventually her neck, in earth – but is, as academic Lois Oppenheim states, ‘the plight of all who inhabit the author’s imaginative world’. It is one of Thomas’s key themes too: the ways in which our lives can suddenly seem fixed and implacable, when our choices start to feel not just limited but arbitrary and even irrelevant. Her characters aren’t as wilfully myopic or as cheerfully oblivious to their imprisonment as Winnie, but they nevertheless recognise themselves in her, startled and unsettled by the resonances she invokes.

Claire Thomas

At first glance, the three women have nothing in common with Winnie: Margot, erudite and engaged, is a successful professor of English Literature in her early seventies; Ivy is a wealthy philanthropist approaching middle age, a frequent patron of the theatre putting on the play; and Summer is a young student, working part-time as an usher, seeing the performance for the third time. And yet all three have consternations scratching away at their sense of equilibrium, anxieties that surface as they watch Winnie’s poignant, if absurd, predicament. The novel is, in some ways, an excavation of female doubt, of the myriad pressures crowding women’s lives – and Winnie is its totem, buried and helplessly chirping.

As is often the case in novels that toggle between perspectives, some characters work better than others. Margot, with an ailing husband at home who strikes out at her and leaves her with embarrassing bruises, is expertly drawn, her outward imperviousness vulnerable to flashes of existential terror. Her ‘waverings’ or ‘confusions’ come from expected sources – a fear of ageing and professional irrelevance – and yet from this Thomas weaves unexpected nuances. Margot tells herself that if she ‘reads another opinion column lamenting the invisibility of older women, she might just scream’, but moments later she reassures herself that ‘I haven’t lost it completely … I’m still trim. I know how to dress.’ It is a complex and subtle portrait of a woman with nothing to be ashamed or afraid of, who nonetheless feels shame and fear creeping all around her.

Less successful as a character is the youngest of the women, Summer. Her fear and doubt revolve entirely around her girlfriend, April, who is stuck in bushfires so severe they have blanketed the city in a smoky haze. She resists looking at her phone during the performance, even as her anxiety for April’s safety mounts. The heavy-handed dramatics of this situation are a constant low-level contrivance throughout, but they aren’t the largest problem with the character: a late reveal exploits issues of identity and intersectionality in ways that feel obvious and unconvincing. Summer is never more than a collage, a representation rather than a fully functioning person, and her struggles with race and identity tap into the Zeitgeist all too neatly, in what reads like a sop to contemporary obsessions.

The finest and most supple characterisation is that of Ivy, a new mother who is also an old mother dealing with a vital presence in her life that simultaneously reminds her of an unspeakable loss. Fear is a visceral and physical thing for Ivy, and doubt a kind of badge. She is the only one of the women who actively loves Samuel Beckett, who responds consciously to that extraordinary combination of despair and resolve that drives his work. It is not accidental that Ivy provides the novel with the greatest insights into Beckett’s world and the meaning of Happy Days itself:

She must endure the torture of experiencing each second of each day, with only scant and blessed glimmers when her actions become successful distractions, when her memories are absorbing, when her tight, interminable grip on reality is relieved. The day is long, and she feels each tick.

When the first act of Happy Days concludes and the characters leave their seats at interval, the novel briefly transforms into a play script; Thomas gives us four scenes where the women, as well as several incidental characters, finally interact. Rather improbably, Ivy is Margot’s former student and Summer one of her current ones. A young man who has been sitting next to Margot in the theatre is related to Summer’s girlfriend. This could have been a complex and playful exercise in mimesis or pastiche, a chance for Thomas to inject Beckett’s particular rhythms and syntax into the work. Sadly, this section never lifts above the banal, and it is something of a relief when the novel settles back into its primary mode, the discrete internal monologue as psychological treatise.

There are numerous ways to read The Performance, a work that develops the interest in ekphrasis Thomas displayed in her début novel, Fugitive Blue (2008), which detailed the effects of a painting on a collection of unrelated characters. On one hand, it champions the cathartic power of art, its ability to speak intimately to us as individuals while connecting us to our shared humanity. But there’s another reading in there too, a sharper warning around our tendency to sit in air-conditioned cultural bubbles while the external world burns. Whenever Margot complains of the cold inside the theatre, the echo of Winnie trapped in her ‘expanse of scorched grass’, as Beckett describes it, reverberates outwards. In this reading, none of us is spared.