'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’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.
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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