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Synopsis 'My dad said he jumped buses. Horseboxes. Jumped an aqueduct once. He was gonna jump Stonehenge but the council put a stop to it.' On St George's Day, the morning of the local county fair, Johnny Byron, local waster and modern day Pied Piper, is a wanted man. The council officials want to serve him an eviction notice, his children want their dad to take them to the fair, Troy Whitworth wants to give him a serious kicking and a motley crew of mates want his ample supply of drugs and alcohol.
Jez Butterworth’s much lauded and multi award-winning play Jerusalem transferred to the West End last night (10 February 2010, previews from 28 January), following hot on the heels of fellow Royal Court success story Enron (See Review Round-up, 3 Feb 2010).
The focal point of the play, which is directed by Ian Rickson, is Johnny Byron (Mark Rylance), a limping, caravan-dwelling ex-stuntman, all-round village rogue and modern-day Pied Piper.
It’s St George's Day, the morning of the local county fair, and Johnny is a wanted man. The council officials want to serve him an eviction notice, his children want their dad to take them to the fair, Troy Whitworth wants to give him a serious kicking and a motley crew of mates want his ample supply of drugs and alcohol.
Rylance, who's already won an Evening Standard and Critics Circle Award for his performance (and is shortlisted for Whatsonstage.com and Olivier Awards), got another raft of rave reviews to add to his bulging scrapbook. Whatsonstage.com's Michael Coveney dubbed Byron his “greatest ever modern role and one of the great performances of our time,” while the Independent’s Paul Taylor described his effort as “incomparable.”
The Guardian's Michael Billington encouraged audiences who've already seen the play at the Royal Court to make the trip to the Apollo, where the play “gains immeasurably from a second viewing”. He also mentions the additional cast members, declaring Gerard Horan, Mackenzie Crook, and Danny Kirrane "first-rate." The play can now undoubtedly be considered one of the greatest of recent times, a “magical” must-see.
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (five stars) – “It’s back and it’s better than ever. Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem is deservedly sweeping the best play awards … The Shakespearean anti-hero provides Mark Rylance with his greatest ever modern role … He rises to the challenge magnificently. This is now one of the great performances of our time: sly, funny, reprehensible, big-hearted, barrel-chested, technically awesome and physically monumental … The play is rich, long, full of great speeches and crude incident … You’ll be astonished and overjoyed to find this in the West End.”
Paul Taylor in the Independent (five stars) – “Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, beautifully directed by Ian Rickson and starring the incomparable Mark Rylance, proves to be, if anything, even better than its award-laden, ecstatic publicity suggests … Butterworth's play is liberatingly funny and doubly subversive … Rylance creates the illusion that he has physically reinvented himself to play this tough-bodied broken-boned figure. But he's so in tune with the spirit of the role that it is as if he has co-created the character … Rickson's cast are uniformly superb in all their cranky idiosyncrasies. But Rylance is in a league of his own.”
Michael Billington in The Guardian (four stars) – “Jez Butterworth's play gains immeasurably from a second viewing … Mark Rylance conveys the inner solitude of the public performer … Praise is also due to Ian Rickson's production … Gerard Horan as a publican, Mackenzie Crook as a wannabe DJ and Danny Kirrane as the treacherous Davey are all first-rate. As for Rylance, there is great ambivalence in his portrait: he's hypnotic.”
Henry Hitchings in The Evening Standard (five stars) – “Jez Butterworth’s deliciously wild vision of contemporary England pulses with energy and poetry, and here seems imbued with an extra shot or three of pungent humour … Mark Rylance thrillingly inhabits the role of Johnny Byron … The other performances are excellent. Tom Brooke makes an especially vivid impression … Mackenzie Crook is suitably forlorn as Johnny’s useless pal Ginger. Ian Rickson’s direction is beautifully paced … Butterworth’s text remains digressive but within its baggy corpulence there’s a satisfying tautness, and its world view is refreshing, humane, touching and wickedly funny … Still, the production belongs to Rylance … it’s his mixture of mischievous physicality and pastoral wisdom that guarantees the success of this profane, nourishing, freewheeling and frequently mesmerising piece of theatre. ”
Dominic Maxwell in The Times – “It’s mystical but matter-of-fact; rude but rueful … There’s something magical about Ian Rickson’s production … he is blessed in having Mark Rylance, the most exciting stage actor of his generation, playing one of the juiciest roles in living memory. If this was only the Rylance show, it would still be a hell of a night out. He croaks, he jokes, he imposes. He’s hilarious, he’s heart-breaking. He’s naturalism; he’s music hall … Jez Butterworth’s script shines with self-knowing wit and compassion. Rickson’s direction is so good that you don’t notice it: simply looks and feels like real life, but with all the boring bits taken out. A hilarious, enchanting, affecting evening.”
It is a rare thing not to want something to end but so it was last night watching Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem; to say I was bedazzled just about sums it up.
Returning to the Apollo Theatre for a limited run after its massive transatlantic success, this is possibly the final chance to see Mark Rylance as Johnny 'Rooster' Byron and I think it's time to sell granny to get a ticket.
Rylance is an actor at the peak of his prowess, a quivering, swaggering behemoth. In Byron Butterworth has created for him a modern English folk legend; a protector of maidens, confessor of undesirables, Pied Piper of good hearted children and indifferent rats, this Gypsy King is as wild and dark as the woods that protect him.
Today is St George's Day and the last day Byron has left before he is evicted from the woods that bear his name by an officious Council and rather more painfully, a disgruntled community.
As we hear the strands of a local county fair down the hill, a May Queen goes missing and Byron's motley crew swirl around him; Ginger (Mackenzie Crook) the perennial underdog, Lee (Johnny Flynn) leaving for Australia at dawn the next day, Davey (Danny Kirrane) slaughterer of 200 cows, good time gals Pea and Tanya (Sophie McShera and Charlotte Mills) and The Professor (Alan David), a whimsical pronouncer of Arthurian legends. Trainers and hoodies aside, this lot could be Oberon's faeries; they are as playful, kind and cruel.
A St George's Cross smiles benignly down on their revels and a canopy of trees forms a thick backdrop. England's green and pleasant land is a silent partner in this tale of an old dare devil hamstrung by laws that seek to neutralise him. Butterworth links Byron to his environment viscerally, just what is in his pitch black stare that makes people tremble? It feels like it comes from beneath and within him.
Underpinning this poetry there is a violence and brutishness to Jerusalem and a hell of a lot of humour. Butterworth's bang up-to-date references to Girls Aloud and the Middleton sisters place this world firmly within the England we now inhabit. Ian Rickson's rich and finely tuned production is a roller coaster that will have you guffawing one minute and gasping the next.
Rylance fuses all this into an electric multifaceted man. Both charming teller of tales and supplier of drugs to children, his Byron embodies these and many more contradictions, his bluster and wit hiding a deep seated and inconsolable sadness and anger. It is a towering performance; at the end as he calls on his ancestors, pounding a drum to summon giants, one feels the very foundations of the Apollo Theatre might break.
It’s back and it’s better than ever. Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem is deservedly sweeping the best play awards, and Ian Rickson’s brilliant production with Mark Rylance’s majestic performance as Johnny “Rooster” Byron at its centre gives the West End its finest new play for some time.
So we have a choice on Shaftesbury Avenue between the call of the wild and the tragedy of capitalism in Enron: it’s a wonderful dilemma, but with Jerusalem you feel something deep and atavistic is being unleashed in this woodland retreat in the heart of a Wiltshire forest on St George’s Day.
Jerusalem is a beggar’s banquet, a feast of fools, an awakening of old legends, as Johnny and his tribe bemoan the encroachment of the housing estate, the cheapening of the fairground revels, the banning of bad behaviour and the officialdom of the Kennet and Avon constabulary who are serving an eviction order on Johnny’s metallic caravan and coke-head copse.
Set over 24 hours, Johnny and his crew – including Mackenzie Crook’s dazed, delirious deejay, Alan David’s nostalgic professor, Tom Brooke’s moon-faced dope head and Danny Kirrane’s hilarious plump xenophobe – trade stories without losing the dynamic of the drama.
The Royal Court cast is intact, save for the re-casting of Johnny’s ex-wife, Dawn, whom Amy Beth Hayes now invests with even more spirit and poignancy (despite corpsing badly on last preview). The young girls are great, too, though Jessica Barden needs to improve her audibility.
The Shakespearean anti-hero provides Rylance with his greatest ever modern role, a wounded warrior of the woods with elements of Falstaff, Jack Cade and, in the last act, one of Richard Widmark’s hunted, haunted hoodlums.
He rises to the challenge magnificently. This is now one of the great performances of our time: sly, funny, reprehensible, big-hearted, barrel-chested, technically awesome and physically monumental.
The play is rich, long, full of great speeches and crude incident, rollicking Chaucerian language, set in an enclave of towering beech trees designed by Ultz and bathed in a golden light by Mimi Jordan Sherin (though the passage of the day is not strictly observed) while the beating of the drums merges with the stomping of the gods, the jangling feet of the Morris dancers and the distant echoes of a country fair on a distant day like today. You’ll be astonished and overjoyed to find this in the West End.
- Michael Coveney
NOTE: The following FOUR STAR review dates from 7 July 2009, and this production's premiere at the Royal Court
It’s St George’s Day in the heart of the forest, and the Queen of the May, a tentative teenager in fairy wings, sings William Blake’s famous anthem; we’ll hear the drumming of those feet in ancient time before long, and loudly, too, at the end of the evening.
The Flintock county fair is in full swing, and the community liaison officers of Kennet and Avon council are serving an eviction order on Johnny “Rooster” Byron, a spaced out middle-aged middle earth tramp, a Wiltshire Robin Hood living in a mobile home surrounded by wastrels.
Jez Butterworth’s new play Jerusalem, superbly directed by Ian Rickson, atmospherically designed by Ultz in a great forest of beech trees, is a wonderfully vivid three-act alternative state-of-the-nation play – running at well over three hours with two intervals – that plugs into urban myths and rural legends with an epic sense of the mystery of life in dull times.
Rooster is railing against the new estate, but he also knows that the houses will need re-painting before too long. He greets the new day – we’ve had a brief burst of the wild party night preceding it – by mixing what is obviously his habitual hair of the dog: milk and a raw egg laced with vodka and spiced with a sachet of speed.
Thus Mark Rylance embarks on the rollercoaster ride of his performance as a mischievous wild man, brimful of stories, banned from every pub in the neighbourhood, including the one run by Gerard Horan’s hangdog landlord who has been roped into the festivities as a Morris dancer; he’s only allowed his three grams of “whizz” after giving a dejected display.
Other regulars at Rooster’s include Mackenzie Crook’s dilapidated ex-plasterer Ginger, with ideas of being a deejay; Tom Brooke’s wild-eyed Lee who emerges disoriented from inside an old sofa having burnt all his things and bought a one-way ticket to Australia; and a pair of teenage girls played with forward insouciance by Jessica Barden and Charlotte Mills.
Butterworth’s deal is that we’ve lost something of our souls in the process of civilisation and the onward march of morality, and in one brilliant scene with his former partner Dawn (Lucy Montgomery) and their six-year-old son (Lenny Harvey), you smell the price Rooster’s paid for the liberty he pursues. It’s a glorious evening, a feast of British character acting at its very best, led by Rooster Rylance at the top of his game.
When I originally saw Jerusalem at the Royal Court I was not quite caught up in the 5-star hysteria, apart from marvelling at Mark Rylance's extraordinary performance. Possibly I had heard too much about what it is really like to have something like Dale Farm on your doorstep to find Jez Butterworth's tale of drinking, drugs and criminality romantic or heroic. However, given the astonishing success of the play in the West End, New York and now back for a final fling at the Apollo it seemed sensible to re-evaluate what many people regard as the greatest play of the century so far. On a second viewing it is possibly not as funny as on first acquaintance but I was struck by a sense of sadness hanging over the sad and wasted lives of almost every character. A substantial proportion of the cast are still in place after more than two years, but there is a substantial improvement in the current Pea, although the actors playing Lee and especially Wesley are not a patch on the originals. Rylance is still a force of nature but this is a more subdued Rooster Byron, aware of his declining faculties and his lack of a place in a changing world. Jerusalem is undoubtedly a remarkable play, even if only for the success it has achieved, but mainly because of the larger than life character of Rooster Byron which Butterworth and Rylance have created. - David Baxter
12 Jan 12
Who wouldn't side with Johnny 'Rooster' Byron and his indomitable spirit. A true hero in the old mold - unbreakable.
And has anyone considered that his stories are real...? Or have we become a nation of rationalists? - Martin
31 Dec 11
Yes, strong lead actor and some good laughs and various themes hit on but it drags on, the dialogues are neither deep, nor punchy, nor hilarious most of the time. Felt like leaving at the first break and regretted not acting on the impulse thinking it would somehow get more interesting and live up to the hype. - Steve
15 Dec 11
One of the worst 10 plays I have ever seen - a 3 hour endurance test. A bunch of characters I couldn't care less about, spouting weak jokes propped up by tiresome foul language. - oldhasbeen
06 Nov 11
Saw this on Saturday. Thouhgt I wouldn't be able to see it because of the popularity and price but went online Friday night and saw that the upper circle restricted view ticket(s) were over £47, I think. Queued £10 for a Box A, instead. Never done day seats before nor saw Rylance live, I think. He was making eye contact it felt like al the way, through. One of the best things I've ever seen on stage. Matched All My Sons and Blood Brothers, I think. Bravo! - theatrefan
17 Oct 11
This play was refreshing and amazing, the acting was brilliant, and it had me on the edge of my seat the whole time (literally because of the nose-bleed section seats!). Really worth seeing if you don't mind foul language. I would rate it 5 stars, only I took 1 off because the play is very long, and I felt the 3rd leg dragged on a little too long. Go see it !! - Guest
09 Apr 10
Emotionally exhaustive, brilliant play. 1000 thanks to my lovely lady friend for getting tix and talking me into seeing the play while on vacation in London. Go see this before it's too late. - J. Martinez
09 Apr 10
A lovely opening song ruined by the rest of the play. Abysmal script with excessive amounts of swearing and innuendoes it was a truly awful night out. Great performance from Rylance and most of the others but it was a shame they were depicting such horrible characters. Do youreslves a favour and save your money, i 100% DON'T recommend this play. - MH
13 Mar 10
Truly 5 star. Rylance deserves all the plaudits. Fabulous writing too. SEE THIS PLAY! - Peter G
04 Mar 10
When I reviewed this play during the Royal Court run six months ago, I said it was great though not a classic – well, I’m wrong; it is! It has so much depth that it needs a second view. It's a theatrical feast with an epic sweep and it’s very funny, but somehow the contradictions come through more. Your sympathies are with rebel Rooster Byron but you know you’d hate it if he was your neighbour. You laugh at the ‘war stories’ of drug-fuelled parties the morning after, but you can’t approve of his drug dealing. Your heart is with his in an England of old but your brain knows things have to change. Even his young followers both celebrate and exploit him. There are many themes being explored here – changes in rural life, tolerance of different lifestyles, urban invasion - and you’re thinking about them a long time after you’ve left the theatre - but it’s the pace, rhythm and energy that sweeps you away and sustains a running time of over 3 hours without flagging for a moment. There is more poignancy second time round and his loneliness really gets under your skin. It’s a real state-of-the-(rural)-nation play with lots to say about lots of things, but without rights and wrongs, taking sides or preaching. At times last night, I felt I was in the woods with this lord of misrule and his pilgrims. There are a lot of young inexperienced actors in this superb ensemble who will no doubt never forget the experience of a nightly masterclass in acting from Mark Rylance, who positively inhabits this wonderfully meaty role of Shakespearean proportions. You don’t see many performances like this in a lifetime. There’s an Airstream caravan in the woods with a soundscape that helps take you there. It doesn’t look like it was directed, which is a great compliment to Ian Rickson’s direction! It IS a classic and it will be revived in the future, but go and see it now because it’s a play for now with a production and performances which are probably already definitive. - Gareth James
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