Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, at the Royal Court Theatre
Mark Rylance in "Jerusalem"
Jerusalem
by Jez Butterworth
Royal Court Theatre, until August 15
Director Ian Rickson
Designer Ultz
Lighting Mimi Jordan Sherin
Sound Ian Dickinson for Autograph
Composer Stephen Warbeck
Cast includes Jessica Barden, Tom Brooke, Greg Burridge, Lewis Coppen, Mackenzie Crook, Alan David, Aimeé-Ffion Edwards, Lenny Harvey, Gerard Horan, Danny Kirrane, Charlotte Mills, Lucy Montgomery, Sarah Moyle, Dan Poole, Harvey Robinson, Mark Rylance, Barry Sloane
Across Sloane Square from the Royal Court Theatre stands a carousing bar incongruously named The Botanist (perhaps they should open a raunchy gay bar called The Chartered Public Accountant). I hung out there before the curtain rose on the company's new offering, Jerusalem, wondering whether to liquor up. A snootful helps when a comedy is laying an egg. I didn't anticipate that Jerusalem would, although it's so new that notices hadn't appeared yet. Funny is fragile. To one American sensibility (mine), Yes, Minister is a sleep aid, Little Britain is a transmission from an alien planet, and Mr. Bean isn't worth a bean. Yet I firmly believe in the maxim (I can't remember who uttered it) that the British are the only race with a genuine sense of humor.
Not to worry. Jerusalem is ridiculously funny in the harebrained way of whimsy mixed with naughtiness, updated Wilde by way of Ayckbourn. Although every other word is fuck and cunt, it also avoids the cringing comedy of humiliation perfected by Sacha Baron Cohen -- profanity in this case is simply the lingua franca of the "educationally subnormal outcasts" onstage. The audience is on the playwright's side from the curtain raiser onward. Action begins with a waif-like teenage girl singing the iconic hymn "Jerusalem" dressed in a satin smock and fairy wings. She sweetly warbles the first verse when suddenly there's a roar of amplified rock music. Panicked, she runs offstage as the curtain rises to reveal a drunken bacchanal at a wooded campsite, replete with girls frugging, lads gyrating like insane soccer hooligans, and the host, Johnny "Rooster" Byron, executing the bright idea of shooting his television to death.
It's gruesome to analyze why anything is funny, and I won't attempt it. But this was very funny, and in addition, author Jez Butterworth has deftly announced, in less than five seconds, the whole purpose of his play. Which is to comically oppose the mystical idealism of William Blake's lyric (source of the touchstone phrase "green and pleasant land" that every English child learns as faithfully as American children learn "O beautiful, for spacious skies") with sanitized, uptight New Labour Britain. Butterworth stands in the line of bucolic nostalgists like Tolkien. He summons up earth spirits from the Green Man and Titania to Gog and Magog and the Druids. One has a right to wonder if he really means it -- Tolkien certainly did -- or is this a species of familiar Lit Crit cleverness?
Pause here. Current British drama, in its higher West End echelons, is rife with entertainments for an elite audience, people who did well on their A levels being talked to by people who did even better. Butterworth, educated at St. Alban's and Cambridge, is self-consciously literary, and so are his characters. That can be poisonous to sincerity. Within five minutes of Jerusalem's first act we know, from the actors' own mouths, that our hero Johnny Byron is a wastrel scamp in the lineage of Falstaff, that he functions as the Pied Piper of Wiltshire, attracting stray kids to his battered silver Airstream in the woods (he even calls them rats, and one is named Lee Piper), and that his zany profanity and drug-soaked habits are a thin veneer for Yeatsian eloquence about the lost world of primeval England. All join hands and vow to follow the hobbits to Stonehenge.
End pause. Happily, Jerusalem transcends its raw materials, and in Rooster we meet a genuine original, at once a loser, rebel, myth-maker, outcast, bandit, and savior of lost souls. It's a heady mix of light and shadow (pied, indeed), and Butterworth shifts from antic comedy in the first act to a serious confrontation in the second, as the local authorities show up to evict Byron from his squatter's paradise -- the town wants to build a new swanky estate. Yet it's the third act that seals Jerusalem's ambition to burn itself into our memories. Rooster puts up a fight for his small corner of the ancestral green world, and in so doing he runs afoul of bloody violence. To carry off this drastic darkening, one needs a lead actor with incredible range.
The play has found one in Mark Rylance, sure to win this year's Olivier award for his bravura turn as Rooster. Lounging outside his camper in grungy fatigues and t-shirt, he is the master of revels and spinner of fantastic yarns. Verbally, epic raunch is his trademark, as in this (abbreviated) version of how Rooster came to be born of a virgin. A hapless Wiltshireman suspected his wife of cheating on him with his best friend. Following the couple to a cheap hotel, he catches them in flagrante delicto, his friend enjoying his wife "from the back seats." The enraged husband shoots the humping friend in his balls. The bullet passes through, ricochets off a brass bedpost and out the window, where after a few more ricochets it enters a bus, passes through an old lady's handbag, and comes to rest in the privates of a young girl riding to work. She is impregnated by the bullet and gives birth to Johnny Byron without benefit of sexual congress. Johnny emerges from the womb with a full head of hair, a black cape, and the ability to speak. He turns to his mother, and his first words are "What was that dark place I came from?" To which she replies, "England." Now imagine this tale delivered at top speed with many profane flourishes, and you get the gist of Rooster's delirious dialogue.
Butterworth has created brazenly self-aggrandizing characters who delight in their own verbal pyrotechnics, but in the end it's Jerusalem's good heart that saves it, even as Rooster's intent to save lost souls dooms him. Falstaff vanishes from sight in pathos, and tears-after-laughter is called upon here. Nobody will miss the play's originality or Butterworth's astonishing talent. He credits Pinter as being a "gi-normous" influence, but I wonder if Shakespeare, as ever, isn't hovering in the shadows of the glade.
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