No! Not the 1960 Arnold Wesker play, just to read the synopsis of which makes me relieved that I haven’t seen it, though I did once see an AmDram production of ‘Roots’, but the hit of the moment, the Jez Butterworth play, which even to those who may feel that it does not have merit, is extraordinary in acting as a vehicle for the tour de force, not to say primeval force which is Mark Rylance.
In these articles, I usually try to give my own feelings about an artistic event, an exhibition, or a play that I’ve seen. I like to feel that my writing transcends some of the populist criticisms of the Arts that appear in the newspapers. But I don’t think I can do better than quote, entire, Charles Spencer’s review of the play which in many ways was the highlight of theatregoing in 2011 – just squeezed in in time – the 1.30pm matinee performance on December 31st 2011. Up until then, perhaps the most riveting piece of theatre that I can remember lasted about 15 to 20 minutes. The young and unknown Jonathan Pryce, at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1975, in Trevor Griffiths’ ‘Comedians’. The feeling of being drawn into a frightening and uncontrollable environment, with eyes and attention only for the stage and the antics of the character in the scene. Upscale that intensity and ferocity to a play of over three hours and you have some idea of the mesmeric effect that Mark Rylance produces in this play. Read what Charles Spencer has to say:
“It was with a feeling of apprehension that I walked up Shaftesbury Avenue to see Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem with its extraordinary performance from Mark Rylance as the wild gypsy and former motorcycle stunt-rider Johnny “Rooster” Byron”.
This was my third visit to the play, which seemed like an instant modern classic when I first saw it at the Royal Court in 2009. And Rylance’s performance struck me as perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most thrilling I had seen in more than 30 years of professional theatre-going.
Would the magic survive a third visit, or would familiarity breed if not contempt, a suspicion that there might actually be less here than met the enraptured eye and ear?
Reader, don’t worry. Jerusalem, recently returned from a 20 week run in New York, has lost none of its potency and, unbelievably, Rylance’s Tony-Award winning performance seems even more hilarious, moving and inspired than ever.
Watching him is like watching a great jazz musician hitting an amazing streak of improvisation. The basics remain the same, but there are new grace notes, sudden departures into new territory. The comic energy of his performance as a Falstaffian Pied-Piper who attracts Wiltshire village kids to his mobile home in the woods for wild drug and alcohol fuelled parties is now accompanied by a deeper vein of melancholy and apprehension.
The Rooster still makes a blearily hung-over first entrance only to perform a handstand on a water trough and lower his head in it to wake himself up. And his breakfast still consists of a carton of milk, a raw egg, several generous shots of vodka and a wrap of speed mixed up in a pint glass and dispatched in one long swallow.
But I was more aware this time round that character is beginning to feel his age, that his amazing stories of giants and being kidnapped by Nigerian traffic wardens are a defence against a rising awareness that his best days night be behind him and his time is running out.
His awkward dealings with his young son are deeply touching, his constant displays of preening vanity a joy. Rylance is surely the only actor in the world who can somehow contrive to limp and strut at the same time, his dark eyes glittering with a mixture of mischief and something darker and more disturbing.
Butterworths’s Jerusalem is a hymn to both the old England of folk tales and rural mystery, and a lament for the housing estates and petty officialdom that are screwing it up. It is a defiant celebration of freedom, yet at the same time one feels an undoubted sympathy for any proud householder who finds himself living near a man like Rooster Byron.
The play is at once funny and sad, tender and terrifyingly violent, and director Ian Rickson and the superb supporting company capture all its richness and ambiguity. But what lends the play its amphetamine rush of excitement is watching Rylance, an actor of indisputable greatness, giving the most thrilling performance it has ever been my privilege to witness.”
Probably enough said! For those who want to read on though, there are some hilarious put downs, for example of Morris Dancing. As Max Baker, who plays Wesley the publican, performs a Morris Dance on stage to delight Rooster and his clan, in order to earn a dose of drugs, he laments the ridiculous outfit (which I noticed said ‘Sarum Morris’). His explanation of the interpretation of the dance is punctuated by Rooster who observes ‘I thought it meant: “I have lost all fucking sense of self respect”’. Ginger, Rooster’s cadaveric sidekick is wryly and cleverly played by Mackenzie Crook. The lines where Ginger recounts the reason that Rooster has been barred from every pub in Flintock are hilarious. The f count and indeed the c count is extraordinarily high, but all seems perfectly in context when heard in the play. One surprise for me was the immense success which this production had on Broadway. It is so full of contemporary English references that one doubts whether Americans can understand more than about half of the play; at one point Rooster hums the introduction to ‘Match of the Day’, the Antiques Roadshow gets a mention, as does David Beckham. How many Americans have ever heard of Wiltshire, Avebury, etc? As the play moves towards its terrifying climax, a wonder, a joy: Sandy Denny’s ‘Who knows where the time goes’, one of my favourite songs, exquisitely appropriate, and in keeping with the folk music feeling that Rooster’s Romany life in the woods engenders. Remarkably, Wikipedia seems to have tracked this down to a live version sung in a John Peel programme on radio, September 11th 1973. It’s a rather simple version, without some of the Fairport Convention electric guitar gloss. The background guitar sounds like Richard Thompson.
It’s only fair to say that there have been some negative comments about this play: the jingoistic ‘Albion Good, new housing estate Bad’ which renders the issues in a rather simplistic way. At the risk of boring everybody to death about Jerusalem (but the reason is that if you have not seen it you are unlikely to – it closes soon and it is completely sold out), I now quote Charles Moore’s review:
‘Down with this cult of not-so-Merrie England
Charles Moore sees Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth at the Apollo Theatre.
If no one much had seen Jerusalem, I would have been enthusiastically urging them to do so. Indeed, I still do so. The tragic-comic power and physical vitality of Mark Rylance’s central performance are more than enough to set the play well above the average. But Jerusalem, just returned to the stage for a West End run, has now become a cult. On the night I went, large parts of the audience gave it a standing ovation, cheering almost as if they were political supporters after a piece of mass oratory. What is this about?
Rylance’s character, Johnny “Rooster” Byron (funny how the name “Rooster” is a signifier of outcast, crazy wisdom: see also the film True Grit) talks in wonderful, fantastical riffs. One of them is about how all Byron boys are born with teeth, wearing a cloak and capable of speech. Johnny claims that, after being born, he asked: “What is this dark place, mother?” “It is England, my boy,” she answers. The play is about the condition of England. The curtain is made out of the flag of St George and the action takes place on St George’s Day. The battered old caravan in a Wiltshire wood that is Rooster’s home has a railway sign saying “Waterloo” stuck to it. And of course the play’s title derives from that mystical effusion of William Blake in which he asks a series of questions (“And did those feet…?”) about what may once have happened in England, to all of which the sober, truthful, unimaginative answer is “No”.
The modern England conjured up by Jez Butterworth, the playwright, is dark because it is unfree, and has forgotten its essence. An estate of executive homes threatens Rooster’s sylvan idyll. Health-and-safety, the police and Kennet and Avon District Council are all closing in on him. Even the St George’s Day fair in the village of Flintock has become tame compared with the good old days recalled by Rooster’s younger associate, Ginger (Mackenzie Crook), when punters queued up to pay a small sum to kick a leading citizen in the testicles “all for charity”.
Against this culture of compliance and high-visibility yellow jackets, Rooster and his band of outlaws — under-age girls, drug-abusers, benefit-swindlers and an elderly professor who is crazed by grief and inclined, conveniently, to quote learned stuff about the legend of St George and the merry month of May (though it’s April) — hold out. Rooster is Robin Hood or Wayland the Smith or the Lord of Misrule. In him is concentrated the essence of Old England before eviction orders and mains drainage. He is damaged and threatened, strong and supernatural, in equal parts. He is defeated, yet victorious.
In their standing ovation, the audience is identifying with Rooster, and this is where the fans of the play and, to a lesser extent, the play itself, begin to irritate. You can bet with reasonable certainty that if these cheering theatregoers actually had Rooster and his rout living at the bottom of their gardens, they would be organising petitions against them. It would be the Wiltshire version of Dale Farm. As soon as Rooster’s pikey way of life moved beyond wearing hats at jaunty angles and keeping hens under the caravan to playing loud music in the middle of the night, trading illegal substances and chucking empty beer cans about, they would have the law on to him. And who, to be honest, could blame them? People who welcome gipsies on to their property tend only to be those with extremely long drives.
If the English love of freedom now amounts to no more than yobbish rebellions concocted in the pub after lots of vodka and Red Bull, then it has became a pretty poor thing. One detects, beneath all the profanities now compulsory in any drama that purports to describe “gritty” reality, a vision of English life as sentimental as those early-Victorian pictures of Merrie England some time in the Middle Ages when apple-cheeked totty danced round maypoles.
To be fair, the play, unlike the fans, seems aware of this danger. As it develops (at too great a length), it becomes more sombre. It makes clear that Rooster, despite being a mad, witty fellow, is also a loser, a cheat, a loner. His little son, who shows up, by an uncomfortable plot device, at the worst moment, seems to fear him rather than admire him. There is no suggestion that the man tells the truth about anything.
The worst bits of the play are those in which Rooster delivers speeches about the spirit of England. The best bits — and there are many — are when it leaves off preaching and wanders into the realm of the imagination. I know nothing about Butterworth’s method of composition, but he would seem to combine a lot of time spent in rural pubs with a feel for Shakespeare for which Rylance himself, for 10 years the artistic director of the Globe Theatre, is also famous.
An aspect of the genius of Shakespeare is his reluctance to make a Point with a capital P. His bosky scenes, which appear in several plays, are comic, antic, poetic, not political. Butterworth’s rude mechanicals are at their best when they follow this tradition. There is a marvellous bit when Rooster tells the story of his conversation with a 90-foot giant who told him he built Stonehenge. There is a less marvellous bit, at the end, when he tries to drum up the giants to save his version of England.
Personally, I am a bit of a sucker for Puck, and the magic of “oak, ash and thorn”, but you have only to try to grasp this magic for it to vanish away.’
And finally, even if there are some problems with the play – and the two reviews above I think give a very even handed view – there can be no doubt that one has witnessed a performance of theatrical genius. Within a few seconds of the beginnings of the applause the entire audience was standing, something almost never witnessed in the UK.
On the previous evening, I had been to the National Theatre to see Lenny Henry in ‘The Comedy of Errors’, and while my ear may not be perfectly attuned to Jamaican patois, I lamented the fact that some directors today pay lip service to the spoken Shakespeare, and the farce is everything. Only Claudie Blakly and Michelle Terry, hilariously cast as gorgeous WAGS to the Antipholus of Ephesus, were always intelligible. In the distant past, the RSC used to run entire workshops for their casts on making the metre and the cadence of Shakespeare’s blank verse both audible and intelligible to a modern audience. While listening to the diction of Mark Rylance and Alan David as ‘The Professor’ in Jerusalem, every word as clear as a bell, I lamented even more. Time for some light relief – here are the WAGS from TCOE – Blakley centre, Terry right:
The blogging of these events has once again stopped me from writing about Egypt, and even from the other events which made this visit to London so worthwhile, particularly the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery. They will have to wait for another time...
