Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem is back, 13 years and, as one fellow theatregoer put it on Wednesday, several culture wars since its premiere. Set on a riotous St George’s Day in a Wiltshire village, the day the functionaries of Kennet and Avon council have chosen to evict the defiant “Rooster” Byron from his illegal encampment, the play still pulsates with a punkish, Puckish energy. The company, less white as a group than in 2009, is still seamless; Mark Rylance still mesmerising. It remains one of the most brilliant things I’ve seen at the theatre.
Butterworth has recently disavowed the notion of having created a “state of the nation” play – which would anyway be a remarkably pompous thing to set out to do. That doesn’t mean he didn’t actually write one. What are artists for if not to sense vibrations undetectable by others? Great artists are the nation’s diviners and soothsayers. Currents rise through them, poetically, obliquely, while they are telling themselves they are dealing with the practical craft of making a workable script. Butterworth has boiled Jerusalem down to being a play “about wanting to stay but having to go” – and no, that’s not a veiled reference to Brexit. It is, at its most basic, about characters moving on or offstage, the most fundamental engine-work of drama since Clytemnestra persuaded Agamemnon to step on the purple tapestries at the premiere of The Oresteia in 458BCE.
