Jez Butterworth
speaker
446 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 14 Apr
Jez Butterworth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And I do that a lot when I get inspired by a performer.
Now, I had never seen Mark Rylance on the stage before he did Jerusalem.
I'd not seen him act once.
The only thing I'd seen him do was read some Ted Hughes poems in my living room about three weeks before, and it was mind-blowing.
And I thought, if...
if he can do that in that register, then I need to sit down and try this again.
So it kind of just, I sort of built it for something that I thought he would be able to sing and would be worthy of it.
You'll be familiar with this, which is that, you know, when things really work, they tend to work quite quickly.
And they tend to, at the end of it, you can't tell which part of it...
anyone sort of inspired or did i mean i know that he acted every night and i know i wrote every word but somewhere in the middle there uh he's the water and i'm the salt that makes the sea or the other way around it is this complete blending that i love it at the end of end of a real a real uh magical and numinous uh collaboration you can't you can't pick one from the other
Sure.
The play Jerusalem is set on St.
George's Day in the fictional village of Flintock.
And it centers on a clearing in a wood where a man has lived for several decades as the pariah of the village.
They're kind of both the outcast, kind of like the sacred and the profane at the same time, like the lowest.
And for certain people, the highest sort of access to something beyond the norm, beyond the norm.
the uh drab uh but also a danger and so it's something it's very kind of like liminal uh play takes place on the fringes of a society and the action is simple they want him out and they've been trying to get him out for ages and this is his last day before he is due to be evicted
I think not a lot that was going on at the time, but I think that all of those subjects found their way in at various points.
I grew up about a mile from the biggest gypsy traveller encampment in Europe, in Park Street, just outside St Albans, between St Albans and Watford.
and everywhere you went, you were always bumping into travellers.
Showing 41–60 of 446 · page 3 of 23
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