In the winter dark
Jez Butterworth, like Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill
burst onto the theatre scene on that tidal wave of new British
writers at the Royal Court Theatre in the mid nineties . His play
Mojo, a thriller set amongst London’s gangland,
appeared at the same time as Kane’s Blasted putting
him, at 26, into the front rank of those emerging writers. Not
as prolific as Ravenhill, Patrick Marber and the others –
The Winterling is his third play since Mojo
– he is, nonetheless, consolidating some extraordinary skills
with theatrical language. The Night Heron, a grotesque comedy-thriller,
left London for a rural marshland where, like a modern-day Peter
Grimes, weird loners lived, shunned by the even weirder locals.
The Winterling combines both mixing urban 'crims' with
rural ones.
The setting is a derelict Dartmoor farmhouse under
an air force flight path where West (Nicholas Bell) has summoned
his old partner in crime, Wally (Steven Adams). The third member
of the gang turns out to have killed himself and Wally has brought,
instead, his ‘son-in-law’ (the son, in any case, of
Wally's latest 'bird' Rita) Pasty (Martin Sharpe). Reviews of
the London premiere brought comparisons with the plays of Harold
Pinter. The characters certainly might resemble a gallery of Pinter
memorables; an amiable and talkative tramp straight out of The
Caretaker, a mysterious and menacing overlord straight out
of No Man’s Land – even going from controller
to controlled like Hirst in that play – and two brutal thugs
like in The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party,
No Man’s Land, or even the brothers in The
Homecoming. Even the presence of a whorishly provocative
woman, if not directly influenced by Pinter give the feeling that
you are watching a Pinter-esque play. But Butterworth, like Kane,
Ravenhill and the others reached far back beyond Pinter to the
grandiose revenge plays of the Jacobeans. In an atmosphere of
constant and growing menace West, instead of planning some new
heist, assuming the servile West and surly Patsy had some part
in the death of the ex-colleague, alternately cajoles and intimidates
the pair into submission before they retire to their rooms for
the night. By the end of the act it seems some terrible act of
revenge will take place.
The
second act jarringly opens with a scene that could be a flashback
or a flash forward, the victimiser now - or then – a victim
before re connecting with the first act and playing with the new
power shift. But even then Butterworth builds suspense or revulsion
from unlikely sources. The tramp Draycott (Adrian Mulraney) brandishes
a pig’s heart while the woman Lue (Ella Caldwell) clutches
a box on her first entrance, a favourite theatre prop for storing
severed heads from Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall
back to any number of Jacobean snuff epics.
Butterworth’s language is vivid as the Jacobeans’
too, and riddled with metaphors. A Wally is derogatory term for
an inept fool, for example, and the wally here cowers and stumbles.
The language too has a constantly masks its violence behind a
Pinter-esque banality. West for example, has Wally and patsy out
of their muddy trousers and into nervous submission then having
sent the upstartish Patsy back out into the muddy and dark moors
to fetch cigarettes, questions him about a local historical sight,
the aggression behind the questioning growing by the minute. The
dialogue bristles with overt and implied violence. “You
don’t sleep out here, Wally,” says West after inviting
him to spend the night. “You fall asleep out here, something
creeps up and eats you”.
Conversations about sleep are often loaded with
suspenseful malice or even premonitions: West catalogues the amount
of sleep needed by the famous or notorious, ending with the revelation
that the Yorkshire Ripper slept 18 hours per day. Come the power
shift in the second act, that information injects Wally’s
statement that he slept well and the whole night with a shot of
adrenaline in preparation for the tense final scene. Again the
metaphors set up the impact. A new pact is made with a new objective
and a new victim. As they discuss grisly task at hand you suddenly
realise Patsy also means ‘someone who is deceived and made
a victim’. Without giving too much away this is the point
where many an armrest was clenched and most eyes were suddenly
on the exit door looking for an escape from this final twist in
the plot. Some things defy logic, like West's interrogation of
Patsy over the details of an historical site that Patsy would
only have seen for a few minutes in the dark. Like the time play
between scenes and acts these operate on an internal logic that
feeds back into the play like the fear it generates and consumes.
The end leaves some tantalising possibilities, not least who did
what to whom but who is in charge. I left wondering if the sinister
Draycott might be more than is revealed and the farmhouse is a
refuge for traumatised assault victims.
British theatre has provided a lot of visceral thrills
across the last decade, Butterworth, to his credit has done it
with words. The plays language seems to almost impossible to keep
afloat. The central scenes for the three Londoners and then the
incidental, almost red-herring, ones for the rambling tramp and
escape-proof Lue are difficult juggling acts of necessary ambiguity
and then hard driven suspense. Director Andrew Gray has it happen
within an uncluttered acting area. Who is or might be in charge
is suggested by an actor taking centre stage or sitting in a chair
that represents a seat of power or a seat of interrogation. The
actors seem to pitch their performances up a couple of sizes more
than naturalistic to give an atmosphere of panic at some points.
The three Londoners dominate the action, the locals Draycott and
Lue are left to form endless possibilities. Bell, an actor often
in plays where he is reacting to bad situations here creates one
of his own. He can pull his upper lip back to speak a line like
a snarling dog or make a simple offer of drink sound terrifying.
Crowned, like his London counterpart in the premiere, with a ridiculous
hat - a boy hardly out of his teens sporting such a middle-aged
accessory - Sharpe creates an irritatingly whinging East-Ender
without being over mannered. Patsy's wordy whining, like his description
of his mother as a "mooer you wouldn't even shag in a space
suit" is the source of much of the plays humor and all the
more credit to Sharpe since the part seems impossibly difficult
for a non Cockney to play. Adams is great the sweaty, cringing
wally of a Wally but best when transformed by that good night’s
sleep.
Peter Mumford’s set opens out the familiar
but restricted acting space with second room featuring a rear
window and view onto a desolate landscape. As soon as you enter
the theatre the mood is one of unsubtle menace. The farmhouse
set could almost be a torture chamber. An axe leans by the fireplace,
a circular saw blade the size of a bicycle wheel lies in the grate.
Chains hang from the ceiling, iron shears hang on the wall, a
sickle sits on the mantle piece and an evil looking washing mangle
lurks in a corner. Even the location (one of England’s largest
and oldest prisons is in Dartmoor, as well a setting for numerous
crime stories including Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the
Baskervilles) is foreboding.
Michael Magnusson
To read more of Michael Mangusson's theatre reviews,
check out his blog at
On Stage (and walls) Melbourne.
