Violent and Isolating Potentials of Familial Relationships in Beckett’s Happy Days and Churchill’s A Number In Happy Days and A Number, both Samuel Beckett and Caryl Churchill centrally incorporate images of shocking human violence, with disturbing implications of a potentially dangerous human nature. However, this violence is notably absent from direct view on stage, being continually mediated by memory or verbal retelling and repeatedly obstructed by blocked views or uncompleted actions. The events that audiences do directly experience are stark and limited in nature: Beckett and Churchill have stripped the action of these plays down to the bare essentials, with few characters, restricted movement on stage, and generally simple, unadorned conversation. The haunting presence of violence becomes a shadow that persistently darkens the putatively traditional family relationships that tie together the characters of both plays, continually injuring and isolating them. Parent-child and husband-wife affections intertwine with images of murder, suicide, and abandonment, creating frightening representations of the failures of human love that play into the generally restricted sense of identity, existence, and meaning that pervade both plays. The use of violence in Happy Days and A Number is sometimes conspicuous, and sometimes understated. In Happy Days, the visible presence of a revolver on stage presents a constant reminder of possibilities of suicide and even spousal murder. However, the revolver is never used, and the violence remains a potential rather than a fact. The gun’s noticeability might rely more on any particular staging than on the text.In A Number, Churchill weaves in horrific stories of murder, suicide, and parental neglect. Yet on stage, we see only a series of simple conversations, and the bloody events become back-stories rather than performed actions. Beckett does occasionally use forms of violence as at least partially visible spectacle in Happy Days, such as when Winnie breaks a glass bottle over Willie’s head, when she “strikes down at him” with the beak of her parasol, or when that parasol catches suddenly and magnificently on fire (12). However, when Winnie “strikes” at Willie, he is hidden from view, so that the audience cannot see whether she makes contact. The crash of the bottle is similarly unseen, though we do witness the subsequent blood that trickles down Willie’s bald head. The burning parasol, though spectacularly visible and potentially dangerous, never does either character any harm. Similarly, the horrifying intensity of B1’s murder of B2 might be considered a sort of spectacle in A Number, but in addition to mediating the story of the killing via B1’s retelling, Churchill also deprives her audience of all the grisly details, as B1 refuses to explain how or where the death occurred. Gruesome possibilities are central to the plot of both Happy Days and A Number, but they are also continually obscured. Indeed, characters in both plays disregard such violence with a noted nonchalance. Willie and Winnie never react to her breaking a bottle over his head, as though it were a commonplace occurrence. Winnie’s revolver is thrown right in with her bag of toiletries, as though the comfort it provides her is equivalent to the reassurance she derives from being able to regularly brush her teeth and fix her hair. Salter is unable to recall much of his neglect of B1, and he even compares those two years to “one long night out,” as though such child abuse were equivalent in value to any forgotten eveningat a bar (52). Similarly, Salter hardly reacts to the murder of B2, saying that “it wasn’t so bad as you’d think because it seemed fair. I was back with the first one” (61). This kind of reaction in both plays is surreal, and although both the harmful events and the subsequent indifference are more exaggerated in A Number, both Beckett and Churchill exhibit a kind of casual expectation of destructive human actions that carries disturbing implications about their potential normality to human nature. Indeed, hurtful human responses pervade Happy Days and A Number on a variety of less readily apparent levels as well. The more prominent forms of violence in both plays might be emotional rather than physical. Beckett and Churchill continually highlight an extensive fear of human abandonment in their characters that might typify the mode of emotional violence that the characters dread most. Both B1 and Salter repeatedly remind the audience of the horrifying image of B1 abandoned and cowering under a bed, screaming for his father alone. Feelings of guilt, helplessness, and disgust attached to such scenes prompt Salter to eventually give up B1 altogether, while the remaining traumatic memory of such moments partly motivates B1’s jealous murder of B2, and likely his suicide as well. As an adult, B1 still grills his father to determine whether he was present for those moments under the bed, saying, I want to know if you could hear me or not because I never knew were you hearing me and not coming or could you not hear me and if I shouted loud enough you’d come… or maybe there was no one there at all and you’d gone out so no matter how hard I shouted there would be no one there.” (32) Similarly terrified of being left alone, Winnie expresses a strikingly parallel desire to be heard and responded to: If only I could bear to be alone, I mean prattle away with not a soul to hear. (Pause.) Not that I flatter myself you hear much, noWillie, God forbid. (Pause.) Days perhaps when you hear nothing. (Pause.) But days too when you answer. (Pause.) So that I may say at all times, even when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, Something of this is being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do – for any length of time. (Pause.) That is what enables me to go on, go on talking that is. (Pause.) Whereas if you were to die… or go away and leave me, then what would I do, what could I do? (21) Like B1, Winnie is not only terrified of being alone, but is particularly afraid of speaking unheard, without the possibility of any response. The fear is central, and both characters continually draw the audience’s attention to these possibilities of unobserved abandonment. In act two, B1 asks Salter eight different times whether