Jerusalem won two of this paper’s theatre awards last year: Best Actor for Mark Rylance and Best Play for Jez Butterworth.
Its move into the West End is an occasion for excitement but also anxiety: can it sustain the punch and passion it delivered in the comparative intimacy of the Royal Court?
The answer is a resounding "Yes". Butterworth’s deliciously wild vision of contemporary England — set in a threatened pocket of rural Wiltshire — pulses with energy and poetry, and here seems imbued with an extra shot or three of pungent humour.
Rylance thrillingly inhabits the role of Johnny Byron, a charismatic waster whose caravan — a mobile home only in name — is the hub of the local party scene. He is the play’s beating heart: a courageous charmer who’s also a lifelong criminal, and an amateur historian who switches mercurially between belligerence and poignancy, exulting in tall tales about, for instance, getting kidnapped by traffic wardens in Marlborough and meeting a giant who built Stonehenge.
The other performances are, with a couple of minor exceptions, excellent. Tom Brooke makes an especially vivid impression as Lee, a feckless youth entertaining naïve hopes of a new life in Australia, and Mackenzie Crook is suitably forlorn as Johnny’s useless pal Ginger. Ian Rickson’s direction is beautifully paced, while the leafy, littered design by Ultz is stunning.
Butterworth’s text remains digressive but within its baggy corpulence there’s a satisfying tautness, and its world view is refreshing, humane, touching and wickedly funny.
Still, the production belongs to Rylance. Experience suggests he would prefer to share the credit, yet it’s his mixture of mischievous physicality and pastoral wisdom that guarantees the success of this profane, nourishing, freewheeling and frequently mesmerising piece of theatre.
Jerusalem
Apollo Theatre
Shaftesbury Avenue, W1D 7EZ
