Jenny Wynter says she feels “about 90 years old.”
The comedian, cabaret performer, and mother of three managed to break both her of her feet, but carries on like a trooper. “My mum always said to me ‘you’ve either got to laugh or you’ve got to cry.’ I remind myself of it all the time. I’ll get a lot of material out of it, 'cause it’s just bloody ridiculous. Who breaks two feet!?”
Jenny is known for her fabulously funny shows, combining stand-up, improvisation, and confessional witticism. Her one-woman show ‘Viking Mama’ is a heart-warming rock opera about channeling your inner warrior and finding the Viking-within.
The shamelessly silly storyline concerns a Viking woman who desperately tries to plan a third birthday party for her son (played by a lettuce) at a children’s play centre, yet doesn’t realise you need to make a booking. “Her plans are completely screwed up, and she has to madly put together a birthday party in a day.
“The idea for the whole show came about because I thought it would be ridiculous to do a one-woman rock opera, and I always believed that we should do work that really frightens you, that make you think to yourself, ‘oh god, I don’t actually know if I can pull this off.’ And do stuff that really amuses you.“I was just thinking about motherhood – I’ve got three kids – and you know, clearly that’s a big part of my life, and I was just thinking about some days (especially when I’ve been in a depression), you know battling with that kind of darker stuff, some days I think ‘oh my god, just getting out of bed feels like such a big battle.’
“And so I thought ‘why do you keep doing it?’ I mean, you get out of bed, you feed the kids… Somewhere in there I connected the dots and I thought it’s like armouring up for a battle. You put your armour on and you have to find that inner-warrior and just ‘argghh’, you know, that big charge, and the image of ‘Viking Mama’ just came to me.
“I guess when I was writing it, I was thinking ‘I want to do a day-in-the-life kind of thing’, so what’s a stressful day? Traditionally? [I just wanted to] really up the stakes and push it to the limits. And for me, that is what a birthday party is.
“I’ve always been quite fascinated about the culture [of Vikings]. I have it in my ancestry. When I found that out I thought it was really cool, and my mum said ‘you don’t tell people that. The Vikings were terrible people!’ [But] it was just their style. It was like raping and pillaging and burning – it was just how they were… Now, of course, Vikings through popular culture are very, very cool.
“I did a lot of research for my play – it’s so silly! I think it’s as historically accurate as ‘The Flintstones’. If historians came to the show, I’m sure they’d be mortified… It’s just really fun and stupid, and I guess this was just part of that.
“I play a couple of my kids in the show, but the lettuce is my toddler, and there’s just a fun thing about that. Toddlers are so ridiculous and random anyway, why not be a lettuce? So it was just one of those silly things, and that’s very much my personality. Why not just do what you feel like doing?”
Jenny says the show is ‘incredibly cathartic.’ “It was great to explore the things that drive you crazy in your family... I’ve done one run of it before, and the people who came to that show-the mothers, especially the mothers-said ‘that was so good!’”
