In 4th Week, Jez Butterworth’s darkly comic The Winterling comes to the Keble O’reilly Theatre. Butterworth is known for his modern sketches of Britain: Mojo and Jerusalem are probably the two which received the most acclaim, Butterworth never fails to be funny and honest. The cast of The Winterling describe their characters as “strongly drawn” and Butterworth’s language as “lethal”.
The play is set in an abandoned Dartmoor farmhouse, which is invaded by a host of petty gangsters from London’s East End. Many comic aspects of the play draw on the contrast between town thuggery and country life, echoing Withnail & I. Patsy and Wally are the central comic duo: Wally is played by Arty Bolour-Froushan, a “forty year-old cockney geezer” in his own words. “Like most of the characters, Wally is capable of terrible, terrible things. He is also a bit pathetic.” Bolour-Froushan will strip down to his pants at one point, something co-star Leo Suter enthusiastically plugs as the “most exciting part of the play” – this remains to be seen.
Suter plays Patsy, a vain but cheerful youngster who gets dragged along to Dartmoor by Wally. Suter describes The Winterling as “a difficult play. It keeps its cards close to its chest.” This is Suter’s first major Oxford production. When asked about nerves, he responds philosophically: “There are two kinds of nerves that an actor can get. The first, and worst, is being nervous about not knowing your lines, where you should be standing, what comes next, which is totally terrifying. The second is being nervous as to whether people will enjoy the show as much as you have enjoyed creating it and performing in it. Hopefully mine will be the second kind.”
Draycott is played by Peter Huhne, who says Draycott is “essentially insane. That does not stop him from being harmful and sinister”. Other characters say Draycott is “that guy who’ll bang on at you for hours without having even the sniff of a hint that you couldn’t care less about what he’s talking about” – everyone knows someone like that. A popular line among the cast is directed at some badgers by Draycott: “Right, let’s have it you stripy cunts.” Butterworth at his best.
The word power comes up again and again in the cast’s opinions about the play. Bolour-Froushan says, “Power is a hugely important theme in the play. Learning how, as an actor, to exert power and how to accede to it, that’s been very interesting.”
Lue, played by Carla Kingham, enters in the second half of the play. She is essentially the “winterling” of the title: a winterling is an early crocus and Kingham describes Lue as a “disarming, waif-like creature”. Kingham is required to adopt a West-country accent, something which she says has “changed her thought process”, while Lue’s innocence is “effortlessly sexy and alluring. She has made me realize how incredibly self-aware I can be, so it’s been nice to banish that side of myself for a while.”
Huhne feels liberated by the fact that the audience will have fewer preconceptions of The Winterling as it was written in 2006 and is lesser-known. He says that “people always slate traditional plays, as they always have their own interpretation, and there is inevitably a higher benchmark in a West End production.” However, Kingham says “preconceptions are unavoidably attached, even with a play as little known as The Winterling but why not try and show your audience something different? Offer them a different perspective, a new approach; make them reconsider what they think they know.”
