Jez Butterworth’s hit 2009 play Jerusalem takes a small, grubby woodland clearing and fills it with a distinctly English kind of magic. Not the twee, spangled kind of faeries and spells. Something rougher and darker, and as gnarled and twisted as an old elm tree. In this revival, arriving more than a decade since the play first premiered, all the old magic is intact and potent as ever.
Its original star Mark Rylance is still in place, and his much-acclaimed Olivier and Tony Award-winning central performance as rustic antihero Johnny “Rooster” Byron is still very much a thing to marvel at. He begins with a carnival feat of endurance: downing a full jug of milk, eggs and vodka, and splashing the gloopy mixture on his already stained vest in a grotesque attempt at a hangover cure. But his real curative powers come with words, not deeds. He lifts himself and the teenage misfits who flock to his caravan out of the grime of their immediate surroundings by crafting tall tales that mix fiction and fact, myth and the mundane. In one masterful story, he depicts his meeting with the giant who built Stonehenge, using a lighter stood on its end to represent himself, and then looming over it, swelling to seemingly mythical proportions. In another, he imagines the story of his birth, the powerful sperm that created him borne on a bullet into the womb of his Virgin Mary-like mother. He’s an artist with a vivid palette of history, religion and folklore to paint with, and it’s impossible to do more than sit slack-jawed and listen.
