Rooster’s back.
More than 10 years on since Jez Butterworth’s epic shot of dark enchantment announced itself as the play of the decade at the Royal Court in 2009, Mark Rylance and Mackenzie Crook reprise their respective roles as outlaw Johnny Rooster and wannabe DJ Ginger in Ian Rickson’s revival, and you know what?
Little has changed.
Rylance’s Rooster is still a force of dreadful nature, dealing drugs to the kids, keeping teenage girls in his illegal woodland caravan, and telling tall tales about giants and traffic wardens that may indeed be true.
As Ginger, Crook (why is this man not more on stage?) is still a gormlessly funny, painfully lost twenty-something lad.
But thanks to and austerity, England has changed, very much so.
Strip away the Blake-ian poeticism of May queens and ley lines and the ancient English soil that Butterworth ambivalently with, and you have a savagely persuasive, ugly modern portrait of forgotten rural communities, where dreams extend only to getting mashed on cheap pills in the woods on a Saturday night, where teenage daughters cower in terror from their fathers, where thugs attack ‘gypos’ with hot iron rods and where local job options stop at knitting circles and the nearby abattoir.Â
Butterworth’s disenchanted characters, with their irrepressible surreal comic irreverence, are not heroes, because England even more so than the England of 13 years ago doesn’t allow them to be.
Only Rooster, raging against the encroaching forces of stifling mediocrity and conformism typified by the local Kennet and Avon council, with their petty eviction notices and bovine pride in the new estate, offers a resistance that is mythic and beautiful and almost certainly hopeless.
Jerusalem remains essential viewing – a viciously entertaining portrait of faire rural England that both harnesses and deconstructs a pernicious national romanticism.
It’s also one of the funniest plays you’ll ever see, its dialogue effortlessly quicksilver and true, its 10-year-old cultural references still as fresh as last week. Rickson’s new cast slots in perfectly alongside the old, while Rylance is as good as he’s even been.
One suspects he agreed to do it again because he couldn’t bear the thought of any other actor playing Rooster.
But then nor could we.
Jerusalem at the Apollo Theatre, London.
