The Winterling ( Archived )

Reviews

4 stars Rachel Halliburton , Time Out March 15-22th 2006

It can only be a matter of time before Guy Ritchie options the rights for a film version of Jez Butterworth’s latest play, ‘The Winterling’. The dialogue is testosterone taut, a sense of menace invades every conversation like a razor-blade, and the arrestingly bleak setting is untroubled by the feminine touch.

The playwright who made such a splash with his debut, ‘Mojo’, proves his continuing talent for creating a well-honed play with knock-out one-liners. This time his verbal repetition and feral power-games pay clear tribute to Pinter yet Butterworth makes the style his own by augmenting it with a percussive alliterative wordplay; ‘Go on Patsy. Pop your slacks off,’ one character taunts. ‘Pop them off.’

On Ultz’s stark farmhouse set – where an animal skull hangs over a hearth with a rusty circular saw as a fireback – Mr West awaits his old friend Wally. When Wally arrives, he brings with him the unfortunate Patsy, a fop in Oswald Boateng – allegedly his stepson. Its the first lie of many in this modern-day revenge drama. But as Butterworth makes clear, objective truth is unimportant: the power game for each man here is about imposing his own version of events, be it with verbal dexterity or the bullet.

Director Ian Rickson beautifully judges the pace, and as tales of treachery and torture unfold, the black comedy never misses. Daniel Mays especially – the lanky Pete Doherty lookalike playing Patsy – exhibits a garrulous humour enhanced by a body that can’t twitch without provoking a laugh.

But I’ve one – significant – misgiving: do we really need another play about urban hard-boys being humorously out of touch with their feelings? Sally Hawkins may excel as a lost soul in stilettos, yet this tale of male pride and prejudice seems more laudable for its undeniable style than its boys-are-us content.

Pinter rules the roost as East Enders squabble

Michael Billington, The Guardian, Friday 10th March 2006.

Jez Butterworth,s first play, Mojo, was a Soho thriller; his second, The Night Heron, was stuffed with rural symbolism. His new play contains echoes of both. But the biggest influence is that of Pinter, whose distinctive voice is currently reverberating through British drama in ways that begin to worry me.

Butterworth’s settling is a derelict Dartmoor farmhouse inhabited by West, a gangland fugitive, and a female Waif called Lue. When Wests old partner, Wally, turns up accompanied by his city-slicker stepson, Patsy, a power-play naturally ensues. Since West is on his own territory and seems disturbed by the death of an ex-colleague, I naturally assumed he had lured these East End hoods to Dartmoor to exact revenge. But all, thankfully, is not what it seems.

As we know from previous plays, Butterworth’s language has a dazzling tactile vividness. Patsy has an aria describing his tarty mum, Rita, that creates indelible images: “Turn your back for one minute, shes in the bucket cupboard with a broom across the door.” Butterworth also throws in a character called Draycott who is a hobo cook scrounging his way round the West Country; when he says, “theres a baker in Ashburton wholl pay me two quid just to fuck off,” you instantly believe him.

But what is Butterworth’s play telling us? Nothing more that I could discern than that man is a territorial animal engaged in a desperate battle for survival. The Pinter influence is also ubiquitous. Echoes of The Birthday Party abound, not least in a sequence where West ruthlessly interrogates Patsy about the history of a local fort. Draycott is a rustic version of Davies from The Caretaker, even at one point claiming: “You’ve got the wrong bloke, mate.” And the denouement inescapably evokes The Dumb Waiter. In a way this is a tribute to Pinter but, after seeing this and Mark Ravenhill’s The Cut, Im concerned that too many writers are imitating the masters voice rather than discovering their own.

Ian Rickson’s production undeniably generates its own tension. Daniel Mays is also riveting as Patsy; his look of cherubic innocence wonderfully belies his street-smart patter. Robert Glenister’s West is all vulpine menace, Jerome Flynn’s Wally exudes contained power and there is colourful work on the sidelines from Roger Lloyd Pack as the rural tramp and Sally Hawkins as a passport-obsessed squatter. But, despite the sound of war-planes zooming overhead this is a hermetic play that basically offers us Mojo with mud on its boots.