In the Royal Exchange's 'Happy Days' (Samuel Beckett, dir. Sarah Frankcom), Maxine Peake plays Winnie, a woman half-buried atop a mound of earth.

Adopting a surprising southern accent, she jolts along an unpredictable spoken journey from the hopeful break of day, to the final curtain fall of night, with just her husband for company throughout.

It is a picture of absurdity, eccentricity, and false optimism.

From the start, the audience is shaken, as the circular room depicts an alarm clock, attacking witnesses with flashing lights and siren shocks, an oppression on the senses sustained throughout to keep you hooked, whether you like it, or not.

Physically restricted to little more than facial and verbal expression by the earthy mound, Peake grabs her audience with all she has, as she goes about her routine of prayer and teeth-brushing, before removing a collection of objects from her black handbag for assessment.

On the verge of a Mary Poppins of psychedelia, Winnie evaluates a revolver, near-empty bottle of tonic, and diminished lipstick tube, before egging on her husband Willie (David Crellin) to sing away their troubles — a request he later grants when all hope is at an end.

On the page, Peake's dialogue could read little more than a lonely individual making the most of yet another day in the sun, but the Canon Slade alumnus bends her voice from smile to shriek, pinning Winnie on the edge, twisting superficial optimism into a deep-rooted nihilist choke, gripped by the very earth in which she makes home.

The play is so surreal and strange that the question is unavoidable whether 'Happy Days' would draw such a crowd without a name like Maxine Peake.

Nevertheless, Peake's ability to convey the complications of mortality and hope, all the while imprisoned by challenges to the memory and physical facility and the monological format, make the performance nothing short of jaw-dropping.

David Crellin's Willie, near-silent and ever-sleeping, subtly establishes a balance to the performance, visualising the realities of the couple's uneventful existence to emphasise Peake's erratic shifts from sun-cast happiness to night's darkness.

While Sarah Frankcom and Maxine Peake's 'Happy Days' enforces a confrontation with the distilled purposelessness of everything routined life spits out, the simplicity of the set means it can be a struggle for the audience to stay locked into the dialogue.

However these restrictions are the characteristics of the production that illuminate the genius of Maxine Peake, desperately closing with her focus fixed on a camera before her face, broadcast greyscale on television screens above the stage like a 21st century suicide note.