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...

I would like to give you, Constant Reader, A Tale Of Two Ricksons.

A couple of weeks back Owen and I *finally* caught up with Ian Rickson's production of JERUSALEM which is now back on in the West End. After opening at the Royal Court to tumultuous reviews for Jez Butterworth's play and Mark Rylance's lead performance, it transferred to the Apollo Theatre then onto Broadway winning in close succession the Olivier Award and the Tony Award for Best Actor. Now the production has returned to the Apollo for one last hurrah.

Rylance - in a performance that threatens to eat you alive - plays Johnny 'Rooster' Byron, a drop-out who lives in a caravan deep in a forest in Wiltshere that borders a small town. Byron, although hated by the town's community as a supplier of drugs, is a natural focus for the town's bored and restless youth who party the night away with Johnny and his slacker mate Ginger (Mackenzie Cook).
As the play opens, Lee, one of Rooster's clique, is travelling to Australia and as his friends try to put him off, Rooster faces his own life-changing events - the local council are going to enforce an overdue eviction notice; his ex-lover threatens to stop him seeing his young son and the father of an absconded girl threatens to lynch Rooster if the father finds out Rooster is involved. All this and it's St. George's Day too.

The last point is quite salient as Jez Butterworth's play is a comment on the state of late 2000s England. Butterworth has Rooster represent 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. 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.Rickson directs the piece with a surety of hand which makes the running time of three hours hardly noticeable and the play's heady combination of scatter-gun scatology, dangerous undertow and ruminations on the English soul are socked over the footlights by the remarkable ensemble.

Particularly impressive were Alan David as a ruminating English professor out of step with the modern world, Geraldine Hughes as Rooster's ex- Dawn and Mackenzie Crook as Ginger, Rooster's slacker friend. A special mention to Ultz' forest setting which in the closing moments takes on a life of it's own.But bestriding the stage and play was Rylance, it's impossible to think of another actor playing the role as it seems to come as natural to him as breathing. He was quite extraordinary.

Fast forward a few weeks and along with Sharon and Eamonn we found ourselves schlepping around the side of the Young Vic auditorium to enter the soulless, authoritarian, high security asylum which was the setting for Ian Rickson's production of HAMLET.
The big selling-point of this production was the chance to see Michael Sheen give us his melancholy Dane - how I wish he had been doing it as a one-man show.

Everything that seemed so right with Rickson's direction in JERUSALEM seemed so wrong here, his first Shakespeare production. The whole thing seemed trapped in the all-encompassing 'concept'. Nicholas Hytner's version at the National Theatre last year was set in an Elsinore that was rife with surveillance cameras and ever-watchful courtiers but at least the production had room within it to live and breath - here any life is drained away by the heavy-handed concept clamped down over the text. It's view of Elsinore as a maximum security nuthouse is strained and simply ugly.What purchase can there be in Hamlet's feigned and Ophelia's genuine flights of madness if they are outdone by Sally Dexter's jittery, scratchy Gertrude, all wild hair and exposed nerves. I was greatly disappointed in her performance but at least she made an impression which is more than can be said for James Clyde's woeful Claudius. He is not helped by having his one big scene - Claudius' speech as he attempts to pray - performed in a glassed-in office, his speech relayed to the audience by intercom.

All through the play, Rickson's annoying tricks kept shouting "look at this - you never expected to see a Hamlet like THIS eh?" It all smacked of a 1970s theatre collective production - is there to be NO progress? It also didn't help that I missed the final coup-de-theatre by having a bloody actor standing in my eye line. Allegedly Fortinbrass removes his helmet and swipe me, it's Hamlet. Ooops. Spoiler alert.Every so often a performance sparked interest - Hayley Carmichael briefly shone in the last minutes as a female Horatio, Pip Donaghy's gravedigger seized his moment, Michael Gould was occasionally effective as Polonius (played in the usual office bore style) and Vinette Robinson was the latest in quietly effective Ophelias but the casting of light-skinned black actresses in this role is becoming depressingly obvious. Again she was saddled with annoying business - handing out pills instead of flowers during her mad scene - did no one realise this leads to the background to her suicide? - and P.J. Harvey's tunes for Ophelia's snatches of song merely dragged out the playing length.

I also have to say that the idea of having the stage resembling a large open grave from Ophelia's burial scene to the end of the play worked excellently when Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes and Hamlet were piled in next to Ophelia and Polonious, really bringing home the sense of two families laid waste.All of which means that Michael Sheen will be needing some serious chiropractor sessions after carrying this damn show for nearly three months.

He was certainly charismatic, switching from Hamlet's soliloquies to his gallows humour in the bat of an eye, and investing the role with moments of real humanity. Sadly the one thing I didn't feel for him was any empathy and when Hamlet is left alone with Horatio facing his encroaching mortality, surely you need to have empathy for him. I also felt I was sometimes watching "the wheels go round" during some of his line readings - by trying to speak the text as naturally as possible I was... aware of... the... odd pauses... during his... lines.

Poor Michael Sheen... Ian Rickson done rained on your parade.

Oh and so did I when I sneezed LOUDLY towards the end of "To Be Or Not To Be"

*crimson*

Constant Reader, I am returned from all points west so have a LOT of catching up to do... so I am pulling out my blogging finger and jumping in at the deep end...
Being a film fan in the 1970s means there are a clutch of American actresses that I have an affection for and two such performers are Ellen Burstyn and Carol Kane. The news that they were to make their London stage debuts in the latest revival of Lilian Hellman's THE CHILDREN'S HOUR had me scurrying to book tickets.

The ticket prices however brought my scurrying to a skid with telephone number prices for 80% of the Comedy Theatre - presumably to match the costs of said actresses as well as the leads Keira Knightley and Elizabeth Moss. Ergo I could only afford tickets in the front row of the balcony - which wasn't too painful but for the safety bar that cut across one's view of the stage.
I must admit I went along to gaze at my screen divas and didn't expect to be involved by the play as I was underwhelmed by it at the National Theatre in 1994. However Ian Rickson has directed the play with a relentlessness that powers you through Hellman's rather old-fashioned melodramatics and the committed cast give it their all. If I have a criticism of this approach it is that it refuses to allow any of the characters a moment of humanity so the grim note of the plot becomes rather unrelenting.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR shows the devastating effect of a child's lies on the lives of two of her teachers. Karen and Martha have pooled their resources to run a girl's boarding school in a New England farmhouse. Mary Tilford, is a wilful spoilt girl used to manipulating those around her and when punished for telling lies by Karen, she absconds to her doting grandmother Amelia. Mary tells her she is scared to return and that Karen and Martha are lovers. Mrs. Tilford spreads the news to other mothers who withdraw their children leaving Karen and Martha powerless to stop the whispering campaign. Their reputations ruined, their only ally is Karen's lover Joe. However the scandal has made Martha acknowledge feelings she had long denied...The biggest surprise for me was Keira Knightley as Karen who I have always found on screen to be an awkwardly overly-dramatic performer, all jawbone and elbows, with a clanging modernity at odds with the period roles she invariably plays. But here her tense, contained acting style is well-used particularly in the second act when she releases her pain in a savage speech to a now-penitent Amelia Tilford.

Elizabeth Moss has the tricky role of Martha, who Hellman does no favours to with a fairly sketchily-written character. Hellman builds up to Martha's big reveal of being a lesbian but it comes as no surprise as she has her react so obviously to Karen's lover Joe, another character that in Hellman's hands is little less than a cypher. It is a testament to Moss' tenacity as a performer that she manages to bring some light and shade to the character.
As I said earlier, I went to see my 70s screen queens and I wasn't disappointed. Ellen Burstyn was exquisite as the matriarch of Lancet - she has a particularly musical voice and so it was a pleasure to hear as well as see her. Her last scene as a woman weighed-down with her guilt was beautifully played and made one wish that her role was bigger.

Sadly she had to share most of her scenes with the staggeringly awful Bryony Hannah as Mary. I guess I might have been spoilt as at the National Theatre in 1994 Mary was played by a young Emily Watson who was sensational - here Hannah plays the role like a gibbering schizo making it incomprehensible why anyone would believe her as she is obviously a mental.

Carol Kane played Lily Mortar, Martha's irritating aunt with a hazy history as a successful touring actress who now teaches language and deportment. She was submerged in the first scene due to having to share the stage with some of the worst 'schoolgirl' acting I have yet to see but after that she was a delight - her fluffy exterior masking a self-centred heart.Rickson's stark production is aided immeasurably by Mark Thompson's clapboard schoolroom set and the excellent subtle lighting of Neil Austin.

As I said I was more engaged than I expected to be by Hellman's melodrama which is thanks to Ian Rickson's vision for the play but within that vision, something akin to an emotional core was missing.