Winterlong

Ice creams plopping to the floor like discarded innocence. Amniotic fluid hitting the stage with a hiss. A man dancing to Dean Martin with his wife on a dog-lead. Thanks to the surreal potency of its images, Andrew Sheridan’s debut (which won the Bruntwood Competition) plays better in the memory than on stage.

Opening in Manchester on what could be fireworks night, the outbreak of war or onset of apocalypse, ‘Winterlong’ entrusts its tender heart to Oscar (Harry McEntire), a pubescent loner raised by his grandparents when his parents go awol. Like the daughter unable to tell her dying mother she loves her, the brutal plot screams ‘cunt’ in society’s cancerous face. Oscar struggles to find his way in a broken world where love and hate are confused and violent fantasy is the universal feature of speech.

What caused all this trauma? Neither the set’s uninspired urban waste, Oscar’s Sarah Kane-aping dream of war nor the script’s considerable overcooking of its point that ‘sometimes you don’t know how to touch the people you care for’ is satisfactory explanation.

Played with embattled humour, humanity and an almost Biblical stoicism by Paul Copley and Gabrielle Reidy, the grandparents seem to have had this plague of griefs arbitrarily visited upon them. Still, you might sense a more interesting point about the intimacy of love, disgust and suffering. The grandfather wanted to sing to the corpse of a woman he mistook for his daughter. Instead he could only vomit.