JERUSALEM at Apollo Theatre: 11 years on and still disturbing the peace

He's still at it... Mark Rylance first played Johnny 'Rooster' Byron in 2009 at the Royal Court, transferring to the Apollo in 2010, to Broadway in 2011 then back to the Apollo later that year when I saw it and now it has returned with some of the original cast - and of course Rylance.  

I was surprised how much of the play I remembered after eleven years but it is a strange experience to see a State Of The Nation play thirteen years after it was written.  It still makes it's points about the disenfranchised Wiltshire under-class, suspicious of the encrouching housing estates that are edging ever-closer to the surrounding woods where Johnny 'Rooster' Byron's dilapidated caravan is a magnet for them to party and lounge around listening to Byron's outlandish encounters.

Among his acolytes are part-time DJ part-time plasterer Ginger, Lee who is leaving for Australia, two bored teen girls Pea and Tanya and the oafish abattoir worker Davey.  Also hanging around are the listless ''grown-ups" The Professor and Wesley, the local pub owner.  But they are all threatened by Rooster's ignoring of the local council's attempts to evict him, and the vengeful threats of a local man who suspects his teenage daughter is hiding out in the caravan.  Johnny believes that the giants of Olde England will protect him from danger - but surely this is one story too far...

Ian Rickson has again directed with a sure hand, keeping the locals' outlandishness on the side of reality - no one ever suggests a cartoonish attitude.  They all do work as an ensemble but it's definitely an ensemble - plus a lead player.  As I wrote eleven years ago "Rooster represents the anarchic, subversive and pagan side of England becoming more and more threatened by the advance of the dull grey stupidity of the modern world.  Jez Butterworth and Rylance have stated in interview that the character of Rooser was further worked on during the preview period at the Royal Court and it shows. Rooster almost seems to have grown beyond the play and all the characters opposing him are made as unsympathetic as possible."

If anything Rylance's performance has got bigger with as much emphasis on his many bits of business, his way of walking, even the hesitations and pauses seem to be overly-theatrical... but I cannot imagine seeing this without him sweeping the production around like a cloak.  There have been productions of course without him - Jasper Britton played it in a production at Newbury - but it must seem a very different play.

As before I really liked Mackenzie Crook as Ginger, Rooster's supposed best friend, but Crook effortlessy suggests the character's emptiness inside.  I also liked Gerard Horan as the bored pub manager Wesley, needing cocaine to get through being a Morris dancer and Alan David, returning from the first cast as the vague Professor.  The only weak performance was Indra Ové as Rooster's estranged partner, her over-emphatic performance stood out for all the wrong reasons.

Butterworth's strangely gripping play again has Ultz's cramped, realistic forest set and Mimi Jordan Sherin's atmospheric lighting.  I suspect this will be Rylance's last outing as Rooster so see his Olivier and Tony Award-winning performance while you can.  Although I wouldn't put it past him to do it again in another eleven years time...

THE HAIRY APE at the Old Vic - more misery for Carvel

I was in two minds whether to see the new production of Eugene O'Neill's THE HAIRY APE.  The Old Vic for some reason always seems to be more expensive than most but Matthew Warchus' tenure as Artistic Director has kicked off with a new initiative with half the preview seats being available for £10 each - so I went!

Of course one must always allow that if it's still in preview then the actors are still feeling their way into the production before an audience.  But a paying audience is still a paying audience... 

Eugene O'Neill's play was written two years after THE EMPEROR JONES and both told a non-naturalistic, nightmarish story of an egotistical man, the self-made king of his world, brought down by hubris.  Although only Jones was written for a black performer, iconic black actor Paul Robeson had a huge success playing both the roles on the London stage.

In this production, Bertie Carvel is 'Yank', the bull-headed 'leader' of the stokers aboard a transatlantic liner, whose brooding intensity keeps his fellow multi-national workers in check. His brutalist life comes crashing down when the spoilt daughter of a steel magnet ridicules him in front of the co-workers by calling him a filthy beast.

This sets Yank on a tailspin through New York, he starts a fight but is beaten by the police and thrown in jail where he learns of the Wobblies, a Communist group striving for the overthrow of Capitalism.  When he is released he seeks them out but they too turn on him when they mistake his eagerness for him being a spy.  Rejected by all levels of society and with his ship long since sailed, Yank finds himself in front of an ape's cage at the Zoo...

The annoying thing was that underneath Richard Jones' pretentious production values, you could catch glimpses of what has fascinated directors about this play down the years - the stripped-down tale of an archetypal brute reduced to staring his destruction in the face - but Jones' distancing post-modernist production makes it difficult to engage with it.

It is all the usual shtick from this most annoying of directors, who imposes his design-led style on everything so that he presents you with productions where you just sit and watch, they are productions that don't reach out to the audience - they might as well play it with the safety curtain down.

It seems to me that Bertie Carvel, after gaining success playing the outrageous Miss Trunchbull in the RSC musical MATILDA, is accepting every miserable job that comes along to distance him from that performance.  After his role earlier this year in the Almeida's production of BAKKAI as the doomed King Penthius he follows it up here with the surly Yank who comes to a crushing end.  Bertie - lighten up for fucks sake!

The American accents on display here are shockingly bad too, for a while I really couldn't get where Yank was from - THAT was an American accent??  In a cast of 15 not one, apart from Carvel, deliver a performance in any way memorable.  That's a fib actually, Rosie Sheedy as the spoilt little madam delivers a performance that makes you wish she wanders into the ape cage.

At no point did you feel any sense of menace during Yank's downward spiral as the situations are designed by Stewart Laing with no nightmare quality at all but in a half-arsed post modernist way.  I did like Mimi Jordan Sherin's lighting however.

To say I was disappointed by this production is an understatement but as I said, underneath it all, I could see O'Neill's play still exerting a spell.