Full disclosure: I did not love Jerusalem the first time around. Jez Butterworth’s play about myths and Englishness has itself been so mythologised since that original 2009 run – hailed as the play of the century and celebrated for its Shakespearean qualities – that it seems like heresy to speak of ambivalence in anything other than a whisper.
Butterworth’s language contains great riches and Johnny “Rooster” Byron, the play’s outsider, antihero, rebel and messiah rolled into one, is a blazing creation. But what about the peculiarly flat, Little Britain-style humour of the first act? The peripheral female characters and queasy pejoratives of women? And its harking back to a bygone England – a “holy land” filled with ancient energies, druids and Stonehenge giants – that carries the discomforting idea that Englishness was a better, purer version of itself then?
