Saturday 30 April 2022 The Guardian •

5

Jerusalem reset

this green and

pleasant land

I remember the shock of seeing Jerusalem in 2010: the

absolute jolt of a new play about rural England – and

you didn’t hear much about “England” as a cultural or

political unit then. It wasn’t some pleasant pastoral; it

was a diffi cult, messed-up countryside, albeit steeped

in beauty and myth. Ultz , the designer, had conjured

trees, thickets, grass; a clutter of old drinks cans and

rubbish. Nothing about this was “cool”, nor was it

“experimental”: it was a three-act play set over a single

day , full of Falstaffi an energies – which admittedly

are themselves the energies of the counterculture, of

punk, of an anarchic Englishness, both attractive and

rebarbative. My mind couldn’t help fl ying to other

darkly enchanted forests: Arden, of course, and the

“wood near Athens” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The man was riffi ng with Shakespeare, with Blake. The

confi dence of it was jaw-dropping.

What’s diffi cult to remember is that for the

preceding decade, while Butterworth had been holed

up at home in Pewsey, Wiltshire, trying to get the play

to work, the prevailing cultural tides had seemed

so diff erent. The focus had been on London and its

resurgent inner city, fuelled by a rising economy. The

capital was full of cheap abandoned warehouses where

the YBAs, still actually young, were setting up studios.

I was 24 and working at Condé Nast when the March

1997 edition of Vanity Fair was dumped on my desk

– the famous “London swings again!” issue, with

Patsy Kensit and Liam Gallagher reclining on union jack

pillows. Inside, Tony Blair, just months off becoming

PM, was photographed like a grinning young saint. I

was working at The World of Interiors magazine at the

time. In that venerable home of French ticking and toile

de jouy , our January issue had been – shockingly in its

own way – devoted to concrete. That’s where the buzz

was: concrete and steel , Hoxton and Shoreditch. It was

Damien Hirst, Alexander McQueen, Sarah Kane, the



Charlotte

Higgins

is the Guardian’s

chief culture

writer

River Café. The buzz was not in Wootton Bassett, in

Devizes, in Wilcot or Potterne , the English placenames

Butterworth would conjure like charms.

When did things begin to shift? It’s tempting

to declare that Jerusalem marked the end of the

New Labour aesthetic, but that’s way too pompous.

Anyway, things had gone sour long before: Iraq,

the fi nancial crisis. Lucy Prebble’s play Enron also

premiered in 2009, though Jerusalem, too, contains

a hilarious exegesis of What Went Wrong With the

Economy, via a botched attempt to buy a gram of

whizz. There were other artists working against the

current: Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane were collecting

their Folk Archive , including images of Cumberland

wrestlers and Devonian tar-barrel rollers – exactly

the sorts who might have done a turn at the Flintock

fair, the village festival in Jerusalem. “The new nature

writing” was getting going thanks to people such as

Kathleen Jamie and Robert Macfarlane. Foundations

were being laid that would later, indirectly, give

rise to artworks from Max Porter ’s novel Lanny to

Charlotte Prodger ’s fi lm B ridgit and PJ Harvey’s

Dorset-dialect poetry collection Orlam.

It would be facile to declare Jerusalem the prophet

of Brexit. That would reduce the play. Jerusalem

comes out of something more fundamental: a seam

of rough, sometimes unpleasant English magic that

churns away beneath the surface. It’s in Geoff rey

of Monmouth. It’s in Shakespeare and Blake. It’s in

Jacquetta Hawkes’s A Land. It’s in Alan Garner and

Susan Cooper ; it’s in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel

Lolly Willowes ; Deller would say it was there in 90s

rave culture. Perhaps, though, Jerusalem goes deeper

than that, to a place well beyond “nation” or “myth”,

to the secret places of the imagination – where even

the most rational raise spirits and commune with

ghosts. “Come, you battalions ... Come, you giants!”

J

ez Butterworth’s Jerusalem is back, 13 years

and, as one fellow theatregoer put it on

Wednesday, several culture wars since

its premiere. Set on a riotous St George’s

Day in a Wiltshire village, the day the

functionaries of Kennet and Avon council

have chosen to evict the defi ant “Rooster”

Byron from his illegal encampment, the

play still pulsates with a punkish, Puckish energy. The

company, less white as a group than in 2009, is still

seamless; Mark Rylance still mesmerising. It remains

one of the most brilliant things I’ve seen at the theatre.

Butterworth has disavowed the notion of having

created a “state of the nation” play. That doesn’t

mean he didn’t actually write one. What are artists

for if not to sense vibrations undetectable by others?

Charlotte

Higgins