Jerusalem: Jez Butterworth on Real Life Inspirations, Creative Instinct & The Myth of Rural England
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Why did you choose Jerusalem as this month’s book club pick?
Welcome back to the Service 95 Book Club, and today we're doing something a little bit different, where instead of a novel, we're going to be talking about a play. I've been obsessed with Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth ever since I studied it at school. Long, long, long before I saw it on the stage. The dialogue leaps off the page and transports you right into the English woods where we meet the legendary Lord of Misrule, Johnny Rooster Byron. Join us as we go deep on what is perhaps the most iconic play of the 21st century. We first meet him when he's like mixing this hangover smoothie of sour milk and eggs and vodka and speed for breakfast.
I know that he acted every night and I know I wrote every word, but somewhere in the middle there, he's the water and I'm the salt that makes the sea. Did you get to meet with any other Beatles? I was in the living room there, and I'm sitting two feet away from the piano from Imagine. Suddenly, very loud in Strawberry Fields, someone started playing Don't Let Me Down.
I have chills, actually, just like...
Hey, Jess. Hey. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm so happy to talk to you. Thank you so much for making the time. It is such a pleasure. Oh, good. And thank you so much to all our Service 95 listeners that are joining us today for this very exciting chat. I wanted to say I absolutely love Jerusalem. I studied it for my English GCSE, actually, in 2011. And given that I guess the play had its first run in 2009, I'm guessing that I was kind of the first cohort of students to have studied it. And I couldn't get the tickets to the first run at the Royal Court. But I just remember there was just so much buzz and I feel like people camped outside and, you know, to try and see if they could get returns from the theatre.
And I mean, that must have been pretty mind blowing, no? Yeah.
It was wild, yeah. I mean, it's the sort of thing you dream of. I mean, it was ridiculous. People were literally, like, up the street. I point out it hasn't happened since, but... But yeah, it was weird. It just sort of took off. And yeah, it's kind of dreamful. I mean, it's really lovely to hear how much it sort of meant you when you were that age. I've got almost endless capacity to hear how much people have enjoyed this play or any of my work. I mean, I think it's just such a wished for and blessed thing to happen with any art that you don't come up with for it to just knock the lights out. And yeah. I'm so grateful for it.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like it's stayed with a lot of people. And I think it's one of those plays for, I guess, for people who are listening and maybe might be a bit surprised why I've chosen a script for this month. I think people are going to be very, very pleasantly surprised because I feel like reading a script is so visual. And it's so dynamic and it really transports you into a world. And I'm going to be very intrigued to see what people think when they read it. But I actually, I did end up getting to see the play in 2022. And I felt like it was just this big full circle moment for me. And I saw it in the West End with Mark Rylance's Rooster. And I absolutely loved it. And I, The way Mark Rylance played it, it was exactly how I'd imagined Rooster Byron.
It's quite amazing, and we'll talk more about Rooster in a moment, but I was really kind of wondering, did you always think about Mark for the part?
So I wrote a version of Jerusalem in 2003, and I didn't meet Mark until 2008. And the version I wrote in 2003, we read it through at the Royal Court and it was, I think the nicest thing I could say about it was that as a task, it was beyond me. Just to orchestrate, first of all, just technically for that many characters was something I didn't have the skill to do. And the play was without a motor. And it was kind of, it was really pretty meretricious. And I threw it, I mean, after the read-through, I threw it in the bin outside the Royal Court. And came back the next year, gave it another go, and it was worse. And I decided to just put it in the bin.
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