Full revelation: I didn’t love Jerusalem the first time. Jazz Butterworth’s play on myths and English is so mythologized from this original 2009 series – hailed as the play of the century and celebrated for its Shakespearean qualities – that it seems heresy to talk about ambivalence with something other than a whisper.
Butterworth’s language contains great wealth, and Johnny “Rooster” Byron, the play’s outsider, antihero, rebel, and messiah combined, is a flaming creature. But what about the particularly flat Little Britain-style humor of the first act? The peripheral female characters and the nasty humiliations of women? And his return to a bygone England – a “sacred land” full of ancient energies, druids and giants of Stonehenge – which carries the awkward idea that then English was a better, cleaner version of itself?
This production brings back some of the original players, including director Ian Rixon, as well as Mark Rylance’s Rooster and Mackenzie Crook’s Ginger (a non-working plasterer who considers himself a DJ), and revives some of the same grievances for me. His colorful crew of exiles, leeches, unwanted [and] beggars’ who meet around Rooster’s caravan in an illegally occupied place in the Wiltshire woods to drink and sniff Coca-Cola still look like comic grotesques in their first act.
A colorful member of the crew … Mackenzie Crook as Ginger. Photo: Simon Anand
Now we wonder if they are Brexitists and populists in the making – the pathetic and abandoned ones who can be labeled today. “I’m leaving Wiltshire and my ears are ringing,” says a character who sees no point in other countries. Perhaps, if this play had been resumed before the EU referendum, the capital’s masses would not have been so shocked by the result.
Set for the first time two years after Blair’s break-up of Britain, his references to Chumbawamba, Sex and the City, Bin Laden and the Spice Girls sound dated, giving him a hesitant sense of a play set in the recent past, looking back at the ancient past.
His language precedes #MeToo and Black Lives Matter – and it’s obvious. There is a loose joke about wearing a burqa, another about Nigerian traffic wardens. There are references to women such as “slaps”, “bitches” and fat wives. Byron brags about his conquests and talks about pinching homeless people, while Ginger says, “I don’t really have a GCSE in math, but I have a great big hairy member and balls.” Strangely, this provoked laughter on the opening night.
Psychologically deep … Jack Ridford, Mark Rylance and Ed Kier in Jerusalem. Photo: Simon Anand
These are short references, but others feel repetitive. It doesn’t help that the few female characters are marginal, including Rooster’s ex-partner, Down (Indra Ove), who has been given some good lines, but hasn’t been on stage for very long. When several male characters are clarified later, the women remain motionless.
But the tone of this production is not set in the first, original action, and the play is not a sum of its anachronisms. Although the major ideological issues surrounding women and English continue to run through the three acts, it is a complex and multi-layered play that grows into its magnificence, as alive as the controversial and complex central character.
From the second act onwards, it expands into an increasingly tense, mysterious and majestic drama, huge in its tragedy. Much of this is due to Rylance’s epic performance, both physically and psychologically profound. If Rooster begins as a beast, limping around a story of drunken violence, Rylance captures the man’s remains flawlessly, from his gait to a hangover headache and the descent of nervous, shooting eyeballs.
The show takes place on St. George’s Day, in the woods illegally occupied by the Rooster, as he is about to be evicted, although he continues to protest against the council and new housing nearby. He is both a heroic rebel against the establishment and one of the losers in society; an immortal daredevil (he claims to have risen from the dead and speaks of the alchemical properties of Byron’s blood) and a deluded tramp or “super-tramp,” as Dawn mockingly calls him, and a bad father.
His character grows in strength, bigger, until he looks almost as big as one of the mythological giants he claims to have talked to near Stonehenge. But even more tragic – betrayed, alone, slandered and still in a position, broken, but still challenging.
The ideas of the play about myth and identity are lyrical, but not completely consistent. Ultz’s amazing kit opens up to Bacchanal detritus outside the Rooster caravan – empty bottles, a dirty couch, a disco ball tied to a tree and even live chickens. But it is inconvenient to see the St. George’s Cross written on the curtain at the beginning and then a flag hanging around the back of the caravan. This flag, after the first staging of Jerusalem in 2009, continues to be associated with the far right, and the larger ideas of the play with dewy eyes around England bring an unpleasant closeness to the romanticized narrative adopted by the right.
But any disagreement over the treatment of his themes cannot take away from his drama and lofty central performance. Is this the greatest play of our time? Not in my opinion. But Rylance’s rooster is certainly the greatest performance of the century.
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