The stage pictures a most silent, lonely and barren, surrealistic plain with an unending vista. A permanent noon sun throws 'a blaze of hellish light'. The only distinctive feature is a low mound rising, importantly, stage centre.

Initially, in the earliest typescripts of 'Happy Days', Beckett was particularly concerned with the precise geometrical features and dimensions of the mound:

Grassy expanse rising gently front to low mound summit about 4' high. The swell of the ground is broken, on either side of the summit by two ledges, the lower about 2' from the ground, the upper about 1' below summit. The summit exactly in the centre and would effect one of severe symmetry.

Upon reflection, Beckett resolved that freeing the set from realistic detail would connote more ambiguous, non-representational possibilities. Lives have to be lived in a world without any meaningful pattern:

Expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound. Gentle slopes down to front and either side of stage. Back an abrupter fall to stage level. Maximum of simplicity and symmetry.

In effect, audience attention is drawn away from the merciless emptiness and silence of the infinite uninhabited wasteland and thrown on to the dominant central tableau. The mound entombs the player. How this horrifying predicament came to be is of no consideration. There exists no alternative or escape and no indication of any end to such circumstance.

Act 2 appears to present some change: as the days heap up, so too does the mound, slowly though never wholly burying its prisoner. Yet for the second act, the script insists 'Same as before.' The individual continues to suffer. Any apparent change is insignificant, the player judging the situation as 'No better, no worse, no change'.

The bleak and barren setting mirrors Beckett's view of the painful isolation of human existence. Imprisoned upon life's stage and being progressively buried by time, the player can only seek desperately to distract from the unbearable horror of living.