Jez Butterworth takes another wry and biting look at the eccentricities and the mundanities of life in England with this new play set in the depths of Wiltshire.
A veritable forest has been created on stage by designer Ultz, the setting for the home of “Rooster” John Byron who inhabits a dilapidated silver bullet in the woods outside the imaginary Wiltshire town of Flintock. An aging rogue who has spent years living for free on the land he believes belonged to his ancestors, he makes money by selling his blood to hospitals and drugs to local youths, who turn up at his mobile home like parasites, feeding off Johnny’s constant supply of alcohol which fuels his nightly orgiastic parties. But the residents of a new housing development aren’t too chuffed with Rooster’s presence and the council are on the point of forcibly evicting him.
The action takes place entirely on St George’s day, when Flintock holds its annual fair, and provides a cutting portrait of the contradictions and hypocrisies of small town life, perfectly capturing the clash between classes and cultures that brims beneath the respectable surface. Flintock Fair combines yoga and dog shows with welly wanging and a game based on donkey turd, while floats parade people in costumes which may be “a bit offensive, but it’s all for charity.”
That phrase is uttered by Mackenzie Crook’s Ginger, one of the freeloaders who has attached himself to Rooster. Like the rest of them, he is only too keen to indulge in the fruits of Rooster’s presence in the woods, but lacks the ability to look for a life that involves more than the drug-fuelled revelry of Flintock. Lee, however, is trying, but even his planned trip to Australia seems sparked by boredom rather than desire.
Both Tom Brooke, as Lee, and Crook stand out among the ensemble, yet Jerusalem is all about Mark Rylance, who makes a remarkable transformation to portray the plum role of Johnny Rooster. The porn-star moustache and tats are the surface marks of the man, but it is Rylance’s broken swagger, puffed out chest, slurred speech and twinkling eyes that make the character; a rakish, charismatic and highly intelligent man who harbours depths that the teenagers who feed off him never seek to find. He is also a fantasist, and Rylance’s dead-pan delivery lends a hilarious plausibility to some of the ridiculous stories he tells, enhanced by Ginger’s determination to take them seriously.
This is a world that everyone recognises; of choc-ices and Canaster, Little Chefs and Morris Men. But Butterworth also injects a layer of spirituality into the play. Johnny may be a waster and a fantasist, but he is the only one of the townsfolk to recognise the spiritual heritage of the countryside that produced Stonehenge and Glastonbury Tor. While demons lurk behind closed doors in Flintock – is May Queen Phaedra running from an abusive stepfather? – Johnny’s simple existence is shown to be the more truthful.
Opening with an entertaining first scene which sets the tone for this three-act piece, Jerusalem is a highly imaginative play which sucks every iota of humour out of the mundane routines of small town England.
CB