Imagine for a moment you live on a nice new housing estate in Wiltshire. It's St George's Day and a fine spring morning with a sniff of wild garlic in the air, but across the nearest field at the edge of the wood there's a scruffy caravan surrounded by junk, the home of Johnny 'Rooster' Byron, a gypsy who supplies booze and drugs to local teenagers, holds noisy all-night parties and is banned from all the local pubs. After residents' protest meetings, the local council and police are about to enforce a court order evicting the gypsy and bulldozing his eyesore of a caravan.
That's the setup for Jez Butterworth's irresistible new play at the Royal Court. Butterworth first hit the headlines in the 1990s with Mojo, a play I didn't get to see, then followed it up with The Night Heron and The Winterling at the Royal Court, and more recently Parlour Song at the Almeida. All of these displayed brilliant dialogue, a rare poetic and visual imagination and fascinating characters, but were handicapped by structural flaws; Butterworth struck me as a playwright who was better at starting plays than finishing them. In this work, however, those weaknesses have been left behind. The final outcome of the play is never in doubt, simplifying the story, which takes place over a period of 24 hours. It's enjoyable from start to finish (it lasts over three hours and has three acts), it's hilariously funny (the audience was speechless with laughter) and it provides Mark Rylance with the part of his life as Johnny Byron. This king of trailer trash struts, limps, swaggers and commands his ill-assorted bunch of followers like Falstaff -- a truly amazing, once-in-a-generation dramatic creation in which an actor and a part come together to do something unforgettable. Think of Laurence Olivier playing Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer (also at the Royal Court) and you will understand the historic quality of Rylance's performance. As in the best of Osborne's plays, the central character is so strongly written that he takes on a life of his own. There are strong echoes of Shakespeare in Butterworth's writing, in the balance between coarse humour and poetic beauty, between light and dark, between playfulness and violence, between comedy and tragedy and between reality and fantasy. The wood isn't the Forest of Arden and the time isn't midsummer but late April, but the idea of the forest as a magical place where the normal rules are suspended runs strongly through this play. Johnny Byron is an outlaw, a trickster, a spinner of yarns, a Pied Piper, a vodka-soaked drunk, and possibly a man with second sight. 'Always search a Byron boy at birth. You never know what he's got on him. A Byron boy comes with three things. A cloak and a dagger, and his own teeth. He comes fully equipped. He doesn't need nothing.' He's a rural lord of misrule but also a braggart and a charlatan. When nobody's looking he reaches slyly for a pair of spectacles to read the eviction notice posted on his caravan door by two local bureaucrats in fluorescent yellow jackets. And when his small son turns up with his mother from the village, he visibly shrinks into inadequacy and uncertainty.
The play works on many different levels, but Butterworth's real preoccupation is the search for some kind of authentic Englishness, the myth expressed in Blake's Jerusalem. The rural idyll of the fictional village of Flintock is shown to be thoroughly bogus, exemplified in a hilarious scene where Wesley, the local landlord, appears in Morris dancing costume. What he really wants are some drugs to get him through the day. Johnny Byron's gang of followers include dim would-be DJ Ginger, a dotty Professor who spouts innocent rhymes about the English countryside, two randy sixteen-year-old girls Pea and Tanya, Lee who's off to Australia as soon as the Flintock Fair is over, and slaughterhouse worker Davey, who never travels outside Wiltshire. The 'Hey Nonny No' version of English history is held up to relentless mockery, but Butterworth is asking what happens when we try to create a rational world of neat new estates run by people in yellow jackets carrying clipboards; we can't live in a world without myth and magic.
This play is easily the best new work I've seen this year, and Rylance (who collected a Tony on Broadway last year for his performance in Boeing-Boeing) is magnificent. If this play doesn't transfer to the West End for a longer run there is no justice in the world, and if it doesn't pick up a clutch of Olivier awards for best new play, best actor, best director (Ian Rickson) and best set design (Ultz again) I will emigrate to Wiltshire.
It is utterly, astonishingly good, isn't it. Restores one's faith in the possibilities of theatre.
Posted by: Andrew (a West End Whinger) | July 23, 2009 at 09:16 PM