![An unlikely hero: Mark Rylance in Jerusalem](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2022/04/13/TELEMMGLPICT000001474722_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqc4ax4efRGHwijrOrxEmxc-9YUxZdauhRdeSUGwvAcdg.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![An unlikely hero: Mark Rylance in Jerusalem](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2022/04/13/TELEMMGLPICT000001474722_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqc4ax4efRGHwijrOrxEmxc-9YUxZdauhRdeSUGwvAcdg.jpeg?imwidth=680)
This weekend, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem returns to London theatre and I urge you to buy a ticket if you possibly can. What I witnessed on a drizzly August afternoon at the Royal Court in 2009 (having queued up with a friend for several hours in the hope of returns) was the most dazzling piece of theatre I had ever seen. It still is.
I realise critical superlatives can be irritating, but bear with me. Jerusalem, set on St George’s Day in Wiltshire and pivoting around the central character of Johnny Byron (loved by his rarely seen young son who wants to take him to the fair, hated by the council which wants to evict him from his woodland purdah, used by the local wastrels who want his booze and pills) is a rich evocation of Englishness in all its troubling forms and gets right to the heart of who we are.
It conjures our mystical Arthurian past and makes us feel closer to the soil. In Byron (played with a muscular dexterity and ultimately an unspeakable sadness by Mark Rylance), we have a swaggering, unlikely hero of modern literature, a Falstaff for the 21st century. Its effect is magical, demonic, raw and unfiltered, but also brilliantly constructed.
So why, 13 years on from its premiere, does Jerusalem’s influence not feel greater? In an interview with The Daily Telegraph earlier this week, director Deborah Warner said that a lot of new writing was mediocre and that theatre is slightly confused about what it is meant to be. I think I know what she means. Jerusalem is a big, bold primal scream. There is a hesitancy about so much new writing, a reluctance to upset the apple cart, and this, of course, has stemmed from our very vocal culture wars.
The turbulence we have seen behind the scenes at theatres in recent months – from the Royal Court to the Old Vic – has proved that theatre is in a state of terror, not knowing what to do for the best, and this is going to have an effect on what we see on British stages. The state-of-the-nation-play is, quite simply, the most important form of drama, holding a mirror up to ourselves. Yet the plays that have followed in the wake of Jerusalem have failed to either root us or unsettle us with the same force.
![The National Theatre’s adaptation of Alecky Blythe’s Our Generation](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2022/04/13/TELEMMGLPICT000292693037_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
And that’s because the Englishness which Jerusalem explores is now an even thornier concept than it was in 2009. The emphasis of much recent cultural commentary is the sense of shame we should feel about nationhood, while Butterworth’s wild, unexpurgated sprawling scream of a piece is in search of just the opposite: pride. The shame discourse results in a sort of editorialising when it comes to new theatre: playwrights feel they must tell us what to think; and are too scared to let rip. There have been a couple of very good plays on the subject of national identity – I am thinking of Mike Bartlett’s Albion at the Almeida and Alecky Blythe’s recent Our Generation at the National – but both were very slightly hampered by their schematic nature.
There was a politeness to both of them, which feels a million miles away from Johnny Byron’s broiling anger. The state-of-the-nation play may have even reached its nadir last year with Moira Buffini’s Manor (also at the National), which was criticised for reducing important topics such as social class to the level of a ropy Seventies sitcom. Is that all the question of Englishness is now fit for, dramatically? Crude satire?
Of course you wonder whether Jerusalem would ever get commissioned today, for various reasons. Johnny’s territorial claim to his land, which manifests itself in an extraordinary invocation of spirits and giants at the play’s conclusion, clobbers you with its plea for the importance of ancestral rights. In an ever more multicultural landscape, this feels like a problem. There is also a pride in specific locality that pulsates through the veins of the play. Says the teenage Lee: “Avebury Standing Stones, through Silbury Hill, right down to Stonehenge, and on to Glastonbury… If you was a Druid, this wood is holy. This is holy land.”
![Victoria Hamilton in Albion](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2022/04/13/TELEMMGLPICT000236603190_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Then there is Johnny himself. He is feckless, deceitful, deeply dodgy, but Christ, I rooted for him throughout: yearning for him to have a proper relationship with his young son, cheering his tirades against Wiltshire county council, which once put a stop to him jumping over Stonehenge. In today’s terminology, Johnny Byron would be held up as a figure of toxic masculinity, an accusation hurled at one of the other great characters of British theatre, Jimmy Porter (from Look Back in Anger).
Yet playwrights need to be brave enough (and given the green light) to create these characters, and allow audiences to relish their ambivalence. Johnny might be a tinpot dictator, but he is far more sympathetic than the pallid, supposedly truthful creations I have seen on stage since. It will be interesting to see whether Rylance has fine-tuned his performance for this revival – will there be pressure on him to bring Johnny’s darkness to the forefront and suppress his twinkling roguishness?
Jerusalem is also a very male play; the female characters, though well caught, rarely get the limelight, and it is ultimately a gathering together of very male antecedents – St George, Shakespeare, Brutus of Albion, stirred together to explore the play’s central themes. Imagine the Royal Court allowing such a triumvirate to be a play’s driving force now.
The thing is that the new Jerusalem will be a box-office smash. In fact, the Apollo Theatre’s website currently suggests it’s completely sold out (although there will be day seats and, every Monday, 300 tickets will be relased for that week's performance). Much of this is down to the pulling power of Rylance, but it is equally a testament to great writing. Current theatremakers should take note of the appetite for this piece, and not be afraid to make art as brave as this too.
Jez Butterworth's bold, brilliant Jerusalem wouldn't be written today
The 2009 play, which is being revived in the West End, feels at odds with theatre's current demand to make us feel shame about nationhood