Jerusalem - Ten Years On

I felt it was trying to have its cake and eat it, too.

Clybourne Park, The Inheritance, The Ferryman all up there too for me.

I totally missed “British”... oops!

The only other one that I think is in that league is Curious Incident, which obviously was an adaptation of the brilliant book.

I didn't see it, which I regret - it was just after I'd moved out of London - and I get the impression it was something you had to be there for. What makes me wonder is, if it was that good a play, why hasn't it had lots of revivals? I feel the same about The Inheritance - a superb production which I'm glad I saw but I don't think the play itself is a classic.

I've said it before and I'll say it again; I'm perfectly happy to accept Jerusalem as a modern classic. Even though it mostly got 4* reviews when it came out and the critics fell all over themselves to give The Ferryman 5*, it is by far the superior work, and although seeing other professional and amateur productions have largely served to reinforce for me what a tremendous job Rylance did with the material, they've also proven that it does stand up even without Rylance or Rickson attached. I honestly don't think anything else from the 21st century stands up to it, even if we open up the criteria to include plays of non-British origin (and even though The Mountaintop beat it to the Best New Play Olivier).

Mark Rylance said "5 years is a ripe time for him to revive this again,' that was 10 years ago, so 5 years late already!

Brilliant play and one of the first I saw, so that play has cost me thousands, as it got me hooked on plays, not much have I seen since has matched this.

Jerusalem is unique in a way as it can only work in theatres and would love to see this again, with Mark Rylance would be awesome and this piece would play excellently in the Open Air theatre, as the natural surrounding of trees, would make it like the woods where it is set.

Always thought it was a decent play elevated to something special by Rylance's performance. For me The Ferryman is a much better script. But to be fair to Butterworth, I think he wrote Jerusalem for Rylance so he has to take his fair share of credit for crafting him a great vehicle.

Funny that. I found Ferryman melodramatic and unconvincing, especially the end. But despite the mystic element i thought Jerusalem was utterly realistic. 

I think that Skinner has misread this, the Rooster character is a Falstaffian disruptor, an antihero, not someone to be followed. That others do so shows the lack of magic in our contemporary world (also alluded to by the way that drugs are a way of life).

The poet from whom the play takes its title, William Blake, and the poem itself are more important touchstones regarding its underlying landscape, one of industrialisation enslaving the working class, of conformist religion perverting its message of equality and of suppression of (what Blake desired to be) free love, Blake was a bit of a proto-hippy in a way!

The evil within Blake and Jerusalem is the nationalist, the unfettered, conformist capitalist. The Brexiter little Englander, isolationist, creator of a spurious ‘freedom’ whereby the capitalist is newly enabled to exploit the ‘common man’ is the opposite of what the play is suggesting is our shared ‘Jerusalem’. Brexit is the enabler of the ‘dark satanic mills’, the denier of worker’s rights, of standards and alliances that keep the people safe from their capitalist oppressor.

This is the Rooster that is Blakeian; the man outside the system that has desiccated the lives of his followers.

And, yes, he’s a pain in the arse.

The sadness of the play is that it is only a marginalised waster who carries the torch for this philosophy. The last of a dying race. In a caravan. In a wood.

Ah, I thought he was looking at both. Anyway, the ceremony was steeped in the imagery of the poem, with its creeping industrialisation, albeit with a less apocalyptic feel.

Many have confused the idea of freedom from authority with Brexit, it has likely been the reason why enough were corralled into supporting it. It can probably be twisted from one to the other but, given that Butterworth declined an OBE because Cameron had been stupid enough to try and save his party by letting the electorate destroy themselves instead, I really doubt that it is an accurate reading. Maybe he needs to update it.....

I wasn’t suggesting that he endorsed them or that you thought so, instead that Butterworth would likely be upset if people did (hence a few rewrite tweaks maybe being useful).

My view on the gestation of Brexit is best summed up in my most recent post there about the weaponisation of data. My own working class background means that I have seen what you mention close up but the biggest contributory factor now is that disparate and inchoate feelings have been weaponised by astute manipulation. It’s why the idea of Dominic Cummings being part of government now is so chilling and why the alliance of reality TV star politicians who are edited into people’s hearts are so dangerous. Trump/Johnson/Widdecombe etc., the producers of those programmes have a lot to answer for.

What should be rage against the economic system which keeps people from succeeding is being slyly shifted onto ‘the other’, whether that be the EU or immigrants and so on. It isn’t the working class who are to blame, they/we/I are pawns in a wider, global game.

As you say, those inchoate feelings are present in Jerusalem but the catalyst to twist the characters towards the answers presented through Brexit is absent. It presents the landscape, as it were, but the pathway through it is unclear.; unfortunately, people have been presented with a very partial and misleading map through it (tortuously extended metaphor notwithstanding).

Agreed. He truly tapped into "something" about English identity which is chaotic and singular. Not entirely British, but in some ways totally English. Obviously, I doubt the majority of Brexiteers are theatre nerds. But Butterworth drew from a well of identity just as politicians have done successfully but to different ends.

I didn't see Rylance, but I read the play and for the first time ever reading a play got the impression that this was theatre "not for me", it was speaking to people with a different experience and knowledge of life. (I am a first generation Australian, neither of my parents are native English speakers, my father was a child refugee who had a very complex relationship to standing for 'God Save The Queen' as a teenager in the 1960s.)

I saw a local semi-professional production in Sydney some years later, and dodgy English accents aside, it transferred Rooster's attitudes and surroundings into a depiction of larrikanism, an Australian quality I totally despise. Interestingly, none of the professional theatre companies had touched it and they usually fight each other for everything Royal Court.

I get you but I've met a few Roosteresque men over the years and they closely match MR's portrayal. I'd never thought about it in terms of their lifestyle but they were in amazingly good shape, wiry and muscled but somehow also a bit ravaged. Plus MR came across as less 'clean' than he looks in pics. All these things combined to convey a sense of this soiled yet powerful latent presence in 'Englishness'.