Jerusalem (Broadway tie-in edition) Review

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Jerusalem (Broadway tie-in edition) ReviewRibald best characterizes the high jinks in "Jerusalem," playwright Jazz Butterworth's outlandish poke at contemporary life in the merry modern, English countryside.
In "Jerusalem" everything, it seems, gets reduced to something hilariously sexual in a rude, irreverent way. Ribald is a Middle English word and seeing a production of "Jerusalem" must be similar to what the 15th century English townsfolk experienced listening to "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" and other of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Chaucer and Butterworth both offer a lusty, outlandish and sometimes over-the-top version of life as lived in rural England, old and new.
Here's how main character Johnny "Rooster" Byron recounts the fantastical story of his virgin conception, which is the result of an encounter involving his roving father Hector and a lass not his mother plus Hector's jealous wife, also not Johnny's mother:
The deed occurs when Hector's wife "pulls a pistol, draws a bead and shoots the wayward lad (Hector) slam-bang in the love bells. The bullet passes clean through his scrotum bounces off the bedpost, zings out the window, down the high street to the crossroads, where it hits the number 87 tram to Andover. The bullet passes through two inches of rusty metal, clean through an elderly lady's packed lunch and lodges in my sweet mother's sixteen-year-old womb. Eight months, three weeks, six days later. Out pops him. Smiling with a bullet clenched between his teeth."
His new-born self, Johnny tells us, is different from everyone else in that like all Byron boys, he arrived on this woebegone earth with teeth, "thirty-two chompers," and also hair on his chest. And there you have it. And that's only the very beginning of Johnny Byron's colorful story.
"Jerusalem' begins at midnight in Rooster's Woods, a dot on the map of England somewhere on the Salisbury Plain on St. George's Day. The site, somewhere vaguely near Stonehenge, is Johnny Byron's illegal encampment. The nearby town officials want to see the camp bulldozed after 27 years of not collecting taxes and putting up with all sorts of complaints from residents of nearby Flintlock, 80 percent of whom has taken the time to protest Byron's bad influence and continuing vile presence in their midst.
We'll know by day's end how the camp's leader and his band of mates and hangers-on will respond to the threat to their world order.
Johnny Byron isn't called "Rooster" for nothing. He preens and prances. He scratches about. Often his words are poetry, Byronic. His bluff and bravado are extreme, Shakespearian. At times we feel as if were in Shakespeare's forest on a Midsummer's Eve and Johnny is leading his group of mechanicals.
Byron rants, and fueled often by drugs and booze, he rages against anyone and anything that differs from his word view. Kneeling, he clasps his young son Marky and instructs him, "School is a lie. Prison's a waste of time. Girls are wondrous. Grab your fill. No man has ever lain in his barrow wishing he'd loved one less woman."
All this is to say that "Jerusalem" is a rollicking read, a hilarious comedy that rushes at you with wit and dark slashes of universal insight into the ways things are and moreover the way they ought to be.
English actor Mark Rylance (who grew up in Milwaukee, Wis. where he attended a private preparatory school where his father taught) won acclaim and London theater awards for his portrayal of Johnny Byron when the play opened in 2009. Rylance is bringing Byron to Broadway in April 2011.
Early on, one of Byron's mates Ginger regrets not taking part in one of the group's all-night revels, "Well, that's that. I've missed a party. That's one I'll never get back." On the page, "Jerusalem" conjures up a fully realized universe of contemporary human experience. Read the play in paperback and you'll feel compelled to see Johnny Bryon's extraordinary world brought to life on the stage. Not seeing the play performed after reading the paperback would be, like Ginger says, missing a party, one you'll never get back.
[4.5 stars]Jerusalem (Broadway tie-in edition) Overview

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