Winter Hill, Bolton Octagon, review: It feels like bad 1970s agitprop

Winter Hill is the high point of the majestic windswept moorland plateau above the Lancashire town of Bolton. It's best known for its gigantic 1000 foot high television transmitter mast, one of the tallest structures in the UK. It's also the title of the latest play by the award-winning Timberlake Wertenbaker here receiving its world premiere.

The play was eagerly-awaited. Wertenbaker is the author of a number of award-winning plays, including Our Country's Good, a dramatisation of Thomas Keneally’s novel about a group of 18th-century convicts putting on the first play ever seen on the soil of Australia. It's a powerful piece about the transformative ability of art.

Winter Hill tells the story of a group of women, from a local reading group, who gather in the half-constructed shell of a giant skyscraper hotel being built at the highest point on the west Pennines. All but one are united in their opposition to the edifice which represents the triumph of mammon over the needs of the local community. The debate which ensues – framed in largely feminist terms – is between two idealistic zealots who want to blow up the building and the other women who persist in the horror of violence which previously united the group.

But if the ground seemed laid for a promising debate the result is clunky and hackneyed, from the very moment the sound system blasts out Joni Mitchell singing “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”. No-one ever explains why a property developer would want to build a top-class hotel in such a peculiar location. No-one in the book group seems to have a book. We are just asked to suspend too much disbelief.

Wertenbaker seeks to repeat old devices which weave together political debate and literary metaphor drawn from heroines in the romantic novels which have been the reading group’s shared experience. “Last night I dreamt of Winter Hill,” is the opening line in a heavy-handed reference to the Daphne du Maurier classic.

The play promises an interesting debate about the rightness of using force but then layers it with forced humour, forced literary references and the forced insertion of political facts about global warming and the rest. It feels like bad 1970s agitprop.

Elizabeth Newman's direction adds no lightness or counterpoint of wit. The performances are competent but lack dynamism. The all-female cast, sadly, have to struggle with cardboard characterisations in which the personification of ideas triumph over human warmth. It's all too portentous.