STAGE
Jerusalem, Royal Court Theatre
4/5
IN A NUTSHELL
In Jez Butterworth's contemporary view of this green and pleasant land, waster Johnny Byron awaits eviction from his illegal encampment.
REVIEW
An empty Red Stripe can lies in the grass in front of Rooster Johnny Byron's dilapidated caravan in the woods of Wiltshire. Ginger (Mackenzie Crook) shakes the tin for dregs, drops in a sly fag butt and returns it to the undergrowth.
And yet these same littered woodland floors are trod by fairies, it seems, and yoked to ancient tales of giants. This green and unpleasant plot may contravene the Pollution Order 1974, but something lingers amid the grand old trees with greater potency than the enforcement agents of the Kennet and Avon Council.
In Jerusalem, director Ian Rickson marshals his 14-strong cast with discipline and verve and the setting by Ultz is compelling in its authenticity. But all eyes inevitably fall on Mark Rylance's roaring Rooster Johnny Byron as he plays out the last day of his idyll before the authorities plan to clear away his pile to make way for another identikit estate.
It is a day of epiphanies and revelations. Byron's last day is St George's Day, day of the Flintock Fair, the day before Lee (a delightfully vague Tom Brooke) ventures to Australia, the day Troy Whitlock (Barry Sloane) will have his revenge on the "Worzel maggot" he suspects of harbouring his runaway step-daughter.
Only Byron's not bothered. So he says.
Byron is one of those guys. Every rural town has them. The overgrown youth, the gippo, the amoral drug dealer who welcomes all comers, any age, to his crustie Eden just beyond the grasp of the law.
You like Byron and you loathe him. You want to be free of fluorescent tabards and Health and Safety as he is but you couldn't stand the grubbiness and the hangovers. You admire his particularly English brand of anarchy but you wouldn't want him camped out at the end of your garden.
In a mesmeric performance, punctuated by aching stillness, Mark Rylance captures all these contradictory aspects of this lord of misrule, stitching the opposing parts together with charm and a hypnotic burr in which he marinates tales that are either tall or true or both or none.
When he's alone, you think you'll witness his truth. But even then you're not sure. Is he an out-of-time semi-tragic martyr facing up to humiliation at the hands of clipboard pygmies, or a magical Jack-in-the-green capable of one last act of defiance?
It is that simmering tension that holds together Jez Butterworth's scattergun script, which is as rich and fecund as the Wiltshire woodlands. It is packed with belly laughs and profanities and contemporary resonances and, although it could survive a trim from its three hour length, it is never less than rambunctious.
A strong cast including Alan David as the befuddled Professor, Gerard Horan as henpecked Wesley and Lucy Montgomery as Rooster's former lover Dawn offer strong support.
But it is Rylance's agent of magic and mayhem who will stay long in the memory, like an age-old story that passes in fable.
– First published on wharf.co.uk on July 20.
