Winterlong

The winner of the last Bruntwood Prize, Andrew Sheridan’s Winterlong opened at the Royal Exchange Manchester and is now running in the same production at the Soho Theatre.

The play follows fifteen years in the life of Oscar, born to a teenage mother who abandons him to his grandparents. The world he grows up in is brutal and harsh, the family relations poisoned and twisted. His grandfather hates him. And yet somehow through all of this, Oscar maintains a feeling of openness and love, hope and beauty. Which may not avail him much as the world seems to end with the play.

Andy Sheridan’s previously best known as an actor. This is his first play. It’s promising in lots of ways: the dialogue is flinty and imagistic; the cruelty of the world is vividly and unflinchingly portrayed; the epic span of the play - which leaps forward two years at a time in the first half - is bold and well-handled; the juxtaposition of scenes and episodes, the variety and vigour of them all, gives it a grand feel. Oscar is a great character (performed with extraordinary conviction by Harry McEntire).

It’s unremitting in its horror. The first half in particular does feel a little unmotivated in its brutality; people are so incredibly nasty to each other, again and again, getting fouler just when you thought they’d done their worst, that it never feels quite possible to get a sense of the world he’s depicting - there’s not enough texture there. The scene where Oscar’s mum, Helen, and her partner, Neil, visit the grandparents and Neil humiliates Helen and therefore the grandparents is very hard to watch and to me not particularly illuminating because I didn’t really understand why these events were happening and why we were being shown them. Much more powerful, because subtler, is an encounter between Oscar and a paedophile in the park, the transaction and the sexuality subtler and more ambiguous between them.

Where’s this all come from? I was very struck by similarities between this and A Thousand Stars Explode In The Sky by David Eldridge, Robert Holman and Simon Stephens, which Sheridan performed in. It has a similar familial nastiness and an apocalyptic backdrop. Oscar is very reminiscent of the kind of affectless anti-ironic sincerity that Simon Stephens and Robert Holman particularly go for. (Harry McEntire reminded me of Billy Seymour in Herons and Pornography.) Some critics have spotted Beckett in here, though I didn’t see much of that. Maybe there’s some Kane in the mix.

The writing has many strengths. For me, I didn’t get a very strong sense of voice; and hey it’s a first play, so it will be interesting to see what happens when and if he finds a distinctive style of his own. The play relies a bit on rather strained poeticisms and a few of those wild semi-surreal monologues that are fun to write but dramatically a bit inert because basically they could be anything. I’d be interested to see a stronger sense of drive to the next play and perhaps greater economy. But also I hope he’ll retain the ambition and scale and brutality. Strong debut.