Review

Creed

Education

Theatre

Weirdness

4 July 2025

8 min read

Why I was wowed by this five-hour outdoor drama

Wintershall’s re-telling of an ancient story enthrals a sceptic

Rachel Luckett

Rachel is a reader and writer, a coach, and an educator.

An outdoor theatrical setting shows Jesus with a basket.

Wintershall.org.uk

Were I to write a recipe for disaster, it would look something like this:

Gather a large cast of mostly amateur volunteers and a few professionals
Include everyone from a baby to a 90-year-old man, 1 donkey, 2 horses and a flock of sheep
Create an outdoor venue with no seating and no shelter from the elements
Welcome a mixed audience of around 1200 school children and the public every day for five days
Present a five-hour dramatisation of the entire life of Jesus from 10am to 3.30pm

I am delighted to record that contrary to our assumptions, the above proved to be a remarkable recipe for triumph. Accompanied by my 18-year-old son who, as an actor and teenager, was sceptical, I’ll admit that expectations were not high as we embarked on a 2-hour drive to review The Life of Jesus 2025 at Wintershall Estate. The same drive home was rich in deeply moved and unexpected conversation about the incredible phenomenon just experienced.

Hearing superlatives from me is as unlikely an event as watching a rare desert flower bloom in a decade of drought. And yet, I have nothing else to offer in this case. I have viewed much professional and amateur theatre - Wintershall is like nothing I have witnessed before.

Perhaps what makes it so different is the intent of those who continue to create it. In 1989, Ann and Peter Hutley decided to open their beautiful estate to visitors interested in hearing about the life of Jesus. They began with a nativity in their new barn before Peter wrote a longer script for the millennium celebrations about Jesus’ ministry. It is tangible in the air that this is a monumental work of love and passion not profit-making.

On arriving, we met Ann and her daughter, Charlotte, who has taken over the enormous responsibilities as Wintershall’s producer. With consistent warmth, welcome and energy, Charlotte took us to join the cast as they received exacting professional notes from the director, Ashley Herman. She invited us to join hands with the cast in prayer. ‘No questions asked, it doesn’t matter what you believe, join hands and pray with us. Everyone is welcome here!’ she said. This is the truth about Wintershall in a sentence.

As a teacher of 23 years, I am sorry to admit that I had never heard of Wintershall. I would likely have baulked had someone suggested that I take my class on a daytrip of this format. My assumption would have been that they would hate it, they would be hot, bothered and bored, and I would be very stressed as a result. How foolish am I!

We visited on a day when the audience consisted of roughly 700 captivated school pupils, ranging from 7 – 18 years, and 300 members of the public. The previous few days had been exclusively for schools and had welcomed in the region of 1,200 pupils on each day. Looking for honest opinions, I asked an adult sat near me why she had brought her class. ‘Oh, I’m not a teacher,’ she said, ‘I volunteer to come on this trip every year because it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen. It just gets better and better!’ Clearly my prejudice was misplaced, and this is the very important issue.

My years in education mean that I have watched far too many five-year-olds in wonky tea towels, shouting at an inn keeper while the audience laughs. The life of Jesus has taken on a twee familiarity akin to Jack and The Beanstalk or Cinderella. It has become the stuff of folklore and fairytale when it is anything but. We have distorted it from the contemporaneous, historical recount that it is and Wintershall magnificently sets this straight.

Regardless of faith or belief, there is great damage done in forgetting to view history as reality. Those who work in schools and churches must remember that today’s children perceive the millennium celebrations as ancient history. They cannot fathom time outside of their own existence. All stories from the Egyptians to Princess Diana seem to them to be works of fiction because they must be imagined. Test this, as I have done, by asking them about a recently retired Roger Federer and observe their blank faces!

Even for me and my son, there came a meaningful realisation that this is not merely an all-too-familiar children’s story retold every year at Easter and Christmas. This is the biography of a man whose contemporaries were prepared to die in order to record the naturally inexplicable things that they saw him do. This first lands around 15 minutes into Act One when Wintershall presents Herod’s slaughtering of the children as the horrific and barbaric act that it was, with none of the usual soft-soap. Not gory or gratuitous in any way, it hits hard, just as it should, since, as Charlotte passionately reminded me, this is still happening in the world today! The same hit came from the disturbing noises made by the man suffering from demons, the size of the rocks about to be hurled at the woman accused of adultery and the often-omitted audible gasping of three men dying by crucifixion. These should not be benign imaginings, they are barbaric and torturous reality, and we do humanity no favours in desensitising ourselves.

Wintershall is clear that their production is for those aged seven and above because this is no fairytale. I would argue that this is precisely why they are able to keep children captivated through five hours of intense viewing. They have achieved the perfect balance of hard-hitting realism and enjoyment.

After stretching your legs, Act Two is simply glorious. We forget that Jesus’ ministry took the form of a pilgrimage delivered while walking with people in nature. He spoke on paths, hillsides and lakes which Wintershall authentically recreates. There is nothing to match the experience of sitting on a hillside next to a lake as the character of Jesus delivers the Sermon on The Mount whilst looking you straight in the eye. For the first time, I inwardly understood how a small number of loaves could literally feed a very large crowd because I experienced it first-hand. Quite simply, without needing to be told, you share. You break bread to ensure that those beside you have some and, in so doing, realise that there was always enough for everyone. This precious memory will endure as reality, not magic.

Act Four depicts the crucifixion. Seeing is believing. Again, this stuff of children’s stories is anything but. The logistics of this scene are extraordinarily well executed, and, for the first time, I was struck by the gasping of these men as they spoke. This was no polite conversation about meeting in paradise, these were their final words during their slow and painful death. The act is completed by the inexplicable and somewhat mystical reappearance of the risen Jesus in a different location beside us. I still have no idea how they did it, but it impacted powerfully.

So, what then were the negatives? Any trustworthy review must be balanced.

"There is nothing I have ever seen that I have more wanted to be a part of. Compared with this, I have never seen anything more meaningful."

Remember here my aversion to praise and my teenage son’s initial scepticism. Remember this seeming recipe for disaster and my remit to look critically.

After digging deep, we came up with two very minor concerns that are, in truth, little more than a matter of opinion or preference.

The first relates to the Angel Gabriel. In a production that so brilliantly undoes the fictionalisation of this biography, one could argue for a more nuanced representation of this angel. Perhaps not a female wearing the sparkly halo and white wings that fits with the wonky tea towels in school halls. Perhaps the name of Gabriel is sufficiently recognisable to permit something a little more daring?

The second relates to Act Three. Undoubtedly, the vibrant warmth, variety and personally immersive nature of Act Two makes it a very hard act to follow. Act Three is disadvantaged from the outset by occupying what we teachers know to be toughest gig of the day - that slot immediately following lunch. There is usually some social altercation to sort, attention needing to be refocused, and blood sugar levels fluctuating left, right and centre. At this time of natural siesta, you either accept a lull or bring your largest dose of entertainment. In this case, Jesus enters Jerusalem, overturns the tables in the temple, heals a leper, is betrayed by Judas, prays in Gethsemane, is arrested and tried before Pilate. Essential but not exceptionally entertaining, as the story goes. At around the 60-minute mark in, Jesus is stripped and whipped causing the children around me to literally sit up again and re-engage before Act Four. Perhaps, on reflection as I write, this is just as it should be.

And that is it, the sum of my critique. Believe me, my expectations are unforgivingly high; I struggle booking a holiday because the likelihood is that I will be disappointed. If there were critique to deliver, then deliver it I would.

To the contrary, it is unusually delightful to leave somewhere with the desire to do everything in my power to support a truly exemplary endeavour. It is to my detriment that I have been so ignorant of Wintershall for the last 25 years; I regret the thousands of children that I did not ever take to see this exceptional phenomenon.

I urge you to do better than me, to make up for my short fall.

Go!

Take everyone you can!

Make the journey!

Enjoy the day in glorious natural surroundings!

Show your pupils that even a flock of sheep can be perfectly well-behaved.

Rewrite the soppy fairytale as the gritty, historical biography that it is.

Replace the over-familiarity and wonky tea towels with a real-life experience in how to share what we have so that all might be fed.

Reimagine the mad magician as a man who loved the low, lost, and lonely, and will look you in the eye to remind you that you are blessed.

Reset the polite chat about paradise as the last conversation of a man gasping to share his love as he was killed for upsetting the authorities.

Remember that the infants are still being slaughtered and the women are still being stoned.

Reawaken to the fact that this is no fairytale. This is the message that the world needs.

As my son put it, ‘There is nothing I have ever seen that I have more wanted to be a part of. Compared with this, I have never seen anything more meaningful.’

Wintershall, one and all, you do not need to take a bow.

Stand tall and keep going.

What you are doing is superlatively necessary and remarkable!

Bravo!

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Mapmaking our meaning in a modern world

Real ‘reasoning’ happens only when we have learned to trust one another.

Rowan Williams

A hand holds a pen over a map, at the side is closed journal and colour pencils.

Oxana v on Unsplash.

People first began to think about theology not because they were looking for intellectual stimulus or solutions to abstract problems, but because they found themselves living in an unsettling and vastly expanded ‘space’. They were conscious of new dimensions in their connection with each other, new dimensions in coping with their own fear, guilt, despair, a new sense of intimate access to the limitless reality of God. They connected these new experiences with the story of Jesus of Nazareth, executed by the Roman colonial government, reported by his closest friends as raised from death and present with them and their converts in the communication of divine ‘spirit.’ As we read Christian scripture, we are watching the first generations of Christian believers trying to construct a workable map of this unexpected territory.

When I started writing the assorted pieces that make up the little book on Discovering Christianity (published earlier this year), my hope was above all to convey something of this sense of Christian thinking as a process of mapmaking in a new and bewildering landscape. That’s why one chapter – originally drafted for a Muslim audience – tried to list some of the things that an interested observer might spot in looking from outside at the habits of Christian believers: not first and foremost their spectacular and uniform embodiment of unconditional divine love (if only), but just the sorts of things they said and did, the sort of language used about Jesus, the rituals of induction and belonging. Indeed, if there is one biblical text I had in mind in virtually all the chapters, it is the simple phrase, ‘Come and see’ that Jesus uses in St John’s gospel when he is first followed by those who will become ‘disciples’, literally ‘learners.’

‘Come and see’. When we use language like that in everyday life, we’re encouraging others to share something that has excited or troubled us (or both). It’s not a proposal for solving a problem. It’s not even a recruitment campaign. It’s an invitation to stand where someone else is standing and look from there. In the rich symbolic context of John’s gospel, it’s about sharing Jesus’ ‘point of view’ – which is, as we’re told right at the start of the gospel, a point of view unimaginably close to the heart of eternal life and reality itself.

We can only see in this way when we move away from our ordinary perceptions a bit. Just as we can only learn to swim when we have jumped into the water, so we shan’t learn what faith is all about until we have been prodded by whatever forces around us to take the risk of trusting that (so to speak) the ground is going to hold beneath us if we step forward (I like to speak sometimes about discovering what images, ideas, perspectives and relations are ‘load-bearing’ in our lives).

So part of the invitation is also about telling the stories of those who have taken that kind of risk and what sort of lives they have shaped for themselves in the light of it. There is little point in summoning others just to share my individual set of feelings. But there is perhaps more weight is saying, ‘A lot of people have felt this shape beneath the surface, this grain running through things.’ Which is why – as the book seeks to explain – theology works with the ‘classical’ shared texts that most Christian communities found themselves reading together in the first hundred years after Jesus; and works also with the history of the arguments and diverse perceptions that reading brought into focus.

We read and think in company; our theological reflection like the rest of our lives of faith is a shared, ‘conversational’ affair.

It's not unknown outside theology. We have become so much more interested over the last few decades in how to understand works of art not just in terms of what the artist ‘meant’, but in terms of what the actual work does or makes possible. What world does it create? So we read the Bible, obviously, but we also read the readers of the Bible (think of the Jewish Talmud, with the original text of its classical legal discussions literally surrounded on every page by the arguments that this text has generated). We read and think in company; our theological reflection like the rest of our lives of faith is a shared, ‘conversational’ affair. And so along with reading the Bible and immersing ourselves in the history of what sense others have made of the basic text and story, we also bring to bear the sorts of things that are part of our current conversations in society and culture – the habits of ‘reasoning’ that we have picked up.

There is an important difference between talking about ‘reason’ as a sovereign, detached capacity and talking about ‘reasoning’, the range of processes and practices that carry forward a common life of intelligent learning (and that learning may be at any level of supposed ‘intellectual’ capacity; once more, it’s not about abstractions). Our society these days is fairly comprehensively confused about this: we have a mythological picture of some supremely obvious way of arguing that allows for no final dispute; we call it ‘science’; and then we expect the impossible of it and are disillusioned and sceptical when it can’t give us absolutely certain answers. One of the many ironies of our society is that we are besotted with ‘science’ and at the same time fascinated by the idea that there are many ‘truths’, or else suspicious that apparently objective sources are actually controlled by other interests. Real ‘reasoning’ happens only when we have learned to trust one another’: a long story, but an all-important element in our human discovery.

Bible, tradition, human reasoning – those are the tools we bring to this job of mapmaking. The book is really just a meditation on those words, ‘Come and see’, as the basis of Christian thinking. At the centre of everything is a set of very ambitious claims about what God is like – and what we are like. Part of what we’re invited to ‘come and see’ is ourselves. Once again it’s not unlike what happens in a really good play or film, when we go away conscious that we have seen not just someone else’s story but something fresh about our own selves.

And my greatest hope for the book is that it may prompt someone to look a bit harder, to listen in to how Christians talk – and in that moment find that they recognize what’s being said in some complicated and untidy way. One of the most vivid characters in the gospel I’ve been quoting says of Jesus that he has told her everything she has ever done. I hope that those who are moved to investigate a bit further will come to that same unsettling and exciting point where they see themselves freshly, and the new landscape begins to unfold.

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