I
t was the hottest ticket in town.
The last time Jez Butterworth’s
Jerusalem was on in London,
people set up camp outside the
Apollo Theatre to be first in line
for tickets the next morning,
and bribes were offered in exchange
for a seat. Towards the end of the
epic run, including a stint in New
York, I interviewed Mark Rylance
about this extraordinary, elemental
play — and his role at the heart of it.
How, I asked, had he found his
way into the charismatic character
of Johnny “Rooster” Byron, lord of
misrule and force of nature, who is
facing down the authorities who
want to evict him from his camp in
the woods? “I just play, really. I’m
more intrigued by what comes up
unconsciously and I got into this
business because my way of
passing time as a child was
pretending to be other people.”
This reply, delivered with a
smile and an open gaze, is classic
Rylance. It has the quality of
innocence and directness that he
has retained throughout his career,
as he has gone from stage to
Hollywood star. As Jerusalem
returns to London with Rylance,
now 62, reprising his role, who is
this actor and how does he have
such a hold on audiences?
When he first starred in Jerusalem
in 2009, Rylance wasn’t a household
name. He was born in Kent and his
parents, both teachers, moved to
Wisconsin when he was a child. In
1978 he returned to England to
study at Rada. He was an
extraordinary Hamlet for the RSC in
1988 and a wonderfully funny
Northern Irish Benedick in Much
Ado About Nothing (which won him
his first Olivier award in 1993) and
he ran Shakespeare’s Globe with
considerable success for ten
years from 1995. Yet you had
to be a theatregoer to know
just how special he was,
whether playing Olivia in
Twelfth Night or embodying a
deliciously hopeless Welshman
in a woolly suit in the
comedy Boeing,
Boeing (which won
him more awards.)
Yet he also
exuded a hippy
eccentricity:
even while he ran
the Globe he
expressed his
doubts that an
undereducatedboy from Stratford-upon-Avon
wrote the plays. He believes in the
energy of ancient stones; crop
circles. He consulted the I Ching in
1987 when trying to decide between
a role in Steven Spielberg’s Empire
of the Sun and a new RSC season
(he went for the RSC). He often
wears a hat, even indoors. “I am
aware of being a subject of fun,” he
said in 2015. “I probably do wear
foolish clothes and say foolish
things. If I take offence, it’s my fault.”
Yet by then he had become
properly famous. In that year he had
played Thomas Cromwell in the
BBC’s Wolf Hall. And thanks to
Spielberg’s persistence he took the
role of Rudolf Abel in Bridge of
Spies; his quality of being able to
become someone else without
judgment transferred so well to film
that he won a best supporting actor
Oscar. Spielberg said: “His heart
belongs to a good story. His soul
is pure. He just loves to act.”
As theatres closed in lockdown,
Rylance made a staggering six films.
They included his turn as a sinister,
soft-spoken billionaire in Don’t Look
Up (climate change is a cause close
to his heart), the world’s worst golfer
in The Phantom of the Open and a
tailor mixed up with the Mob in The
Outfit. To come is his incarnation of
Satan in The Way of the Wind.
The increase in work on screen
was partly precipitated by a tragedy.
Rylance married the composer
Claire van Kampen in 1989 and
brought up her two daughters,
Nataasha and Juliet, as his own. In
2012 Nataasha died suddenly of a
suspected brain haemorrhage. It
was Nataasha who had been most
keen on his doing film work.
In returning to theatre, he is
going back to his great love. “It’s
a thousand times more
enjoyable [than film],” he said.
And in returning to
Jerusalem he is revisiting
the play in which his
shamanic ability to conjure
up the spirit of a man is most
fully on display. Butterworth
said that the moment
when he first saw
Rylance transform
into Johnny Byron
was “the closest
thing to magic
I’ve ever seen”.
It is that
alchemy that will
once again have
audiences queuing
around the block. cSarah CromptonAll of this allows the actor playing
him — in this case Rylance — to deliver
a performance that has become the
stuff of myths and legends itself. One of
those “I was there when.. .” live theatre
moments; the perfect marriage of play
and part and performer that seems so
rare. Most of the truly great roles on
stage are transgressive characters — the
sayers of the unsayable, the larger than
life. Butterworth calls for Byron to
move with “the balance of a dancer, or
animal” in a role of incomparable bom-
bast. It’s thrilling. We, like the outcasts
who arrive in the woods, just want to
spend time with him.
Yet is it this deeply romantic por-
trayal of a proud Englishman that has
some questioning whether the play is,
on reflection, a celebration of some-
thing to be wary of? Is Jerusalem that
rare thing in progressive theatre, a pro-
motion of more conservative ideas
about nostalgia for traditions and a
great past that may never have existed?
I know not everything has to be a salvo
in the culture wars that are being
played out mainly in the minds of news
commentators and on comment
threads, but in tense times I can’t deny
the scepticism of some of my, in par-
ticular, migrant colleagues or friends
that now is the right time for an inter-
rogation of nationhood and belonging.
I see Jerusalem as neither an
endorsement nor repudiation of Eng-
lishness. Yes, it is affectionate about
certain cultural particulars, and why
can’t it be, if such sentiments exist and
all the world is a stage? But remember
that in Rooster it also summons a kind
of old radicalism against the establish-
ment — in this case nimbyism and cul-
tural uniformity. The corner of England
presented is described as “a beautiful
spot” by Parsons, the council worker,
which it is on the lush stage created by
the designer Ultz, but only minutes
later Rooster is having a piss across it.
The exaggerated tales and brags of
greatness are seductive and harmless,
until they’re not, and reality reinserts
itself. It feels as if what Butterworth is
saying is that these myths that comfort
us can also destroy us if we use them to
fortify ourselves against the truth of
our situation. Rooster is a romantic fig-
ure, yes — Butterworth calls him Byron,
for heaven’s sake — but he’s also tragic
and lonely without a real place in the
world. The play is messy and complex,
happy and sad, a celebration and a
warning. Sounds pretty English to me.
Either way, just as the woods wel-
come everyone, so too should theatre,
and I don’t know another modern stage
play that unites an audience as much
as this, across cultural and political
divides. Maybe I’m misremembering it,
like one of the myths told in the play.
Or maybe it is, in fact, the stuff of leg-
ends. Into the woods we go. cJerusalem is at the Apollo, London W1,
in a tale about England, not Britain until Aug 7
THE MAGIC OF MARK RYLANCE
Hats off
Mark Rylance| PROFILE
ANDREAS RENTZ/GETTY IMAGES
24 April 2022 7