A pungent, booze-raddled act that rivals Rylance
‘And did those feet in ancient time/ Walk upon England’s mountains green…” The first words of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, set in the fictional town of Flintock, Wiltshire on the day of its annual fair, borrow audaciously from Blake.
Watching the play’s first professional revival since it stormed from the Royal Court in 2009 to the West End a year later (and then to Broadway), more recent footsteps come to mind: those of that acting giant Mark Rylance, who so winningly brought the Falstaffian anti-hero Johnny “Rooster” Byron to reprobate life, and, in so doing, attained the status of a theatrical messiah.
The fittingly bucolic Watermill has good cause to crow as the first regional theatre to get its mitts on this modern classic but how do you follow that Olivier-winning turn? First seen yowling into a megaphone, Jasper Britton rises magnificently to the challenge, or rather sinks and slouches to it. He brings less of the strutting peacock to this wild-man of the woods – facing eviction during the St George’s Day fair from his mobile home, magnet for local kids and much midnight mischief and source of concern for residents at the soulless new estate nearby. You might say comparisons are odoriferous. What Britton lacks in physique he compensates for with pungency: his hair lank, his T-shirt begrimed, he ambles Byron’s detritus-strewn patch in biker’s trousers with telling stiffness, every inch the oncehallowed, much injured stunt rider reduced to being barred from boozers for drunken outrages.
Rylance excelled at an other-worldly charm; Britton’s approach is more tramp-next-door – chain-smoking, booze-raddled – mainly downbeat, then madly growling. Just as Lisa Blair’s revival argues the case for the renewed topicality as house-building (and rural drug-dealing) sweeps the nation, so Britton forces you to see the character afresh as a figure of inspiriting symbolic force and real-life poignancy: a yarn-spinning misfit who invites disdain (even disgust) and yet also covert, needy admiration from those around him – most touchingly, his estranged six-year-old son.
The superb ensemble, meanwhile, make the bravura dialogue sound as revitalising as ever. Lush.