If you’re stuck in an awful situation, putting on lipstick might not be the sort of response you immediately choose. But it works for Winnie, who is buried first up to her waist and then up to her neck in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

When we were in rehearsals for the play which was at the Young Vic earlier this year, Juliet Stevenson, our Winnie, and I met with the writer Nancy Harris to discuss how we might make a response to Beckett’s work. I knew from working with Nancy on The Kreutzer Sonata, a Tolstoy adaptation at the Gate theatre, that she had a real talent for both the form and the psychology of a single-person narrative. The starting point for our short film, Mayday, was Beckett’s heroine’s mantra: “Keep yourself nice, Winnie, that’s why I always say, come what may, keep yourself nice.’’

We decided to place another character amid adversity and see what happened to her. May, played by Juliet in our film, becomes stranded at home. She is in need of help but has the conviction that someone will come and find her. As May waits she occupies herself in the same way that Winnie does. Her spirit is never broken. “Keep up the glamour,” May remarks, applying some lippy.

The Mayday shoot was a pretty hectic couple of days and the learning curve was steep. When I direct a play I can see the complete stage picture and be equally alert to what’s happening in my peripheral vision as in the centre. While editing Mayday, I realised that what my theatre-brain saw on the set was irrelevant. The lens is the only eye that counts – and if the camera didn’t catch it, it didn’t happen. So in the edit the story is crafted from the material you’ve shot, which is so different from theatre, where you can continue shaping through the previews and discover what to change for the next performance.

We tried to evoke Beckett through the materials May would have had around her in the scenario of the film. The musical box is the only form of music that Winnie has in the play; she takes solace from it playing a song from the operetta The Merry Widow. We wanted to find a song that would give May courage and succour that she could call upon in her loneliness. I love the way her voice is a little out of tune as she sings “meet me tonight in dreamland”.

As in Happy Days, Juliet gets buried in the film. She was very patient – comforting herself in Winnie-esque fashion that at least in Mayday she got to lie in a bed. With Happy Days I wanted to make the rehearsal room a happy place. I knew that part of the process involved the director needing to confine a performer and put them in an uncomfortable position but I didn’t want that to become part of the rehearsal room dynamic. So before rehearsals we experimented with burying Juliet in a huge mound of compost – first up to her waist and then up to her neck – and leaving her with David Beames, who plays Willie. This experience helped Juliet understand the stages of Winnie’s entrapment and her response to it and made all our rehearsal contraptions for confinement feel relatively lighthearted. In our film, David plays the maintenance man at the window whom May fails to contact, which was our little mirroring of the relationship that Winnie and Willie have in Happy Days.

What I really admire about Winnie is her inner resilience and strength of spirit. No matter what the bleak strains are in Beckett’s work, his message is ultimately about survival and never giving up. As he wrote: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Wise words to first-time film makers.

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