The most striking thing about The Winterling is how very far from finished it is. In the two weeks since it opened, The Winterling had, to the best of my knowledge, three different endings. There’s the one printed in the book, there’s the one I saw, and there’s one seen by friends of mine at a different performance, which resembled neither what I saw, nor what is printed in the script.

When the dramatic point of the play - the decision towards which a character has been heading for its entire course - can be so easily altered, it shakes your faith in the story. Perhaps the writer Jez Butterworth has decided that all three endings should be played in rep. This would at least catch out reviewers who are tempted to leave at the interval and catch up with the ending in the script on the way home. Or perhaps what actually happens at the end doesn’t matter, in which case; why subject an audience to everything which has gone before?

The play itself seems most influenced by the first two plays by Jez Butterworth. His first, Mojo, was a violent post-Tarantino gangster romp set in the murky world of rock’n’roll promotion in fifties Soho. His second was a rambling comedy set in a cottage deep in the fens. Here we see more gangsters in another cottage, played with equal measures of tension and humour. It is not a mix that works well. The sense of threat makes the comic riffing seem misplaced, while the comedy serves to undermine the otherwise credible sense of violence.

The story opens with West, a tough, cockney hard-man, welcoming his old friend Wally and Wally’s step-son Patsy into his country cottage. In act two we see West’s arrival at the cottage a year before, as a beaten, shivering wreck of a man. He is taken in by the mercurial tramp Draycott and a young homeless woman Lue. It becomes clear that he has been involved with some serious violence back in London, and following a bungled hit, had been tortured by Wally and an associate. In act three, set the morning following act one, we learn that Wally’s reasons for introducing his step-son to his former associate are less than honourable. Wally intends to return to London with only one of the pair alive, and he seems to care very little which one.

It would have been helpful if the cast had seemed like they were in the same play. Robert Glennister as West - the tough-cockney-with-a-past - is solid enough, with an array of tics and stares hinting at his inner turmoil. By contrast, Roger Lloyd Pack (a man cursed to be known forever to the British public as Trigger from Only Fools and Horses) as the tramp Draycott, enters like a refugee from an audience friendly production of The Caretaker, while Daniel Mays as Patsy, the naïve, younger gangster figure, comes close to stand-up with his expansive storytelling and onstage mugging. Individually all these performances are excellent in their own ways, but they don’t look or work as parts of the same dramatic world, and director Ian Rickson seems to have done nothing to reconcile them. The different performance styles clash with one another and create yet another area of uncertainty in a script brimming with problems of its own.