Full disclosure: I did not love Jerusalem the first time around. Jez Butterworth’s play about myths and Englishness has itself been so mythologised since that original 2009 run – hailed as the play of the century and celebrated for its Shakespearean qualities – that it seems like heresy to speak of ambivalence in anything other than a whisper.
Butterworth’s language contains great riches and Johnny “Rooster” Byron, the play’s outsider, antihero, rebel and messiah rolled into one, is a blazing creation. But what about the peculiarly flat, Little Britain-style humour of the first act? The peripheral female characters and queasy pejoratives of women? And its harking back to a bygone England – a “holy land” filled with ancient energies, druids and Stonehenge giants – that carries the discomforting idea that Englishness was a better, purer version of itself then?
This production brings back some of the players from the original, including the director Ian Rickson as well as Mark Rylance’s Rooster and Mackenzie Crook’s Ginger (an out-of-work plasterer who reckons himself a DJ), and it revives, for me, some of the same gripes. Its motley crew of “outcasts, leeches, undesirables [and] beggars” who meet around Rooster’s caravan in an illegally occupied spot of Wiltshire woodland to drink and snort coke still look like comic grotesques in its first act.
Now, we wonder if they are Brexiters and populists in the making – the deplorables and left-behinds they might be labelled today. “I leave Wiltshire and my ears pop,” says one character who does not see the point of other countries. Maybe if this play had been revived before the EU referendum, the metropolitan masses would not have been as shocked by the result.
First staged two years after the demise of Blair’s Britain, its references to Chumbawamba, Sex and the City, Bin Laden and the Spice Girls sound dated, giving it a wavering sense of a play located in the recent past, glancing back at the ancient past.
Its language predates #MeToo and Black Lives Matter – and it shows. There is a limp joke about dressing up in a burqa, another about Nigerian traffic wardens. There are references to women as “slappers”, “bitches” and fat wives. Byron boasts of his conquests and talks of pinching bums, while Ginger states: “I don’t actually have GCSE maths but I do have a great big hairy cock and balls.” Bizarrely, this gets some laughs on opening night.
These are brief references but they feel repetitive and othering. It does not help that the few female characters are marginal, including Rooster’s ex-partner, Dawn (Indra Ové), who is given some good lines, but isn’t on stage for very long. Where several male characters are fleshed out later on, the women stay flat.
But the tone of this production is not set in the first, peculiar act, and the play is not the sum total of its anachronisms, either. Although the bigger ideological issues around women and Englishness continue to run through the three acts, this is a complicated and layered play, growing into its magnificence, as mercurial as its contradictory and complicated central character.
From the second act onwards, it expands into an ever more tense, mysterious and majestic drama, enormous in its sense of tragedy. Much of this is down to Rylance’s epic performance, as physical as it is psychologically profound. If Rooster starts out as a brute, limping around from a history of drunken violence, Rylance captures the wreckage of that man immaculately, from his gait to hangover headache and comedown of jittery, darting eyeballs.
The play takes place on St George’s Day, at the woodland spot being illegally occupied by Rooster as he is about to be evicted, though he continues to protest against the council and the new housing development nearby. He is both a heroic anti-establishment rebel and one of society’s losers; an immortal daredevil (he claims to have risen from the dead and speaks of the alchemical properties of “Byron” blood) and a deluded bum or “supertramp”, as Dawn calls him mockingly, and a bad father to boot.
His character grows in power, bigger until he seems almost as big as one of the mythological giants he claims to have spoken to near Stonehenge. But more tragic, too – betrayed, alone, vilified, and yet making his stand, broken but still defiant.
The play’s ideas around myth and identity are lyrical but do not fully cohere. Ultz’s astonishing set opens up to bacchanalian detritus outside Rooster’s caravan – empty bottles, a mucky sofa, a disco ball tied to a tree and even live chickens. But it is uncomfortable to see the St George’s Cross emblazoned on the curtain at the start and then a flag hung around the back of the caravan. That flag has, since Jerusalem’s first staging in 2009, continued to be associated with the far right, and the play’s bigger dewy-eyed ideas around Englishness carry a queasy proximity to the romanticised narrative that has been co-opted by the right.
But any disagreement around the treatment of its themes cannot take away from its drama and the soaring central performance. Is it the greatest play of our times? Not in my view. But Rylance’s Rooster is surely the greatest performance of the century.
Jerusalem is at the Apollo theatre, London, until 7 August.
