Here’s a really good trick: you charge hundreds of middle class people a three-figure sum each to sit in a place called a theatre. There you put in front of them the kind of tattooed, drug-dealing thief and marginal pedophile whom, if he appeared in the field at the back of their house, would have them ringing the police and moving heaven and earth to get rid of him. And they lap it up, roaring with delight at his antics. This is the magic of the theatre. It’s all been done before, of course: would you want Sir John Falstaff in your local? Even if you did you wouldn’t want him becoming your son’s bosom pal.

Anyone with even a smattering of knowledge of the contemporary theatre will recognise that I have been to see Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem where the lead character, Johnny “Rooster” Byron is superbly developed by Mark Rylance. The play was first put on at the Royal Court in 2009 and is currently revived at the Apollo. It’s very difficult to get tickets as it has been given fulsome praise by almost all critics and been described as the greatest play of the century (so far) though, for the record, when the original production opened in New York there were some critics there who just didn’t get what was good about it.

The play is set in a clearing in a wood in Wiltshire near a new housing estate of seventy four houses the residents of which have signed a petition to try to get rid of the central character. Which brings me to the second great trick that the play achieves: the Cherry Orchard trick. When you watch a good production of Chekhov’s play you never see the eponymous orchard, but you know it is there just as you know the vastness of the Russian forest lies beyond it. This is completely different from what can ever be achieved by cinema or television and much more akin to radio or traditional storytelling. It is your cherry orchard with the size and number of trees that your mind generates,

So watching Jerusalem you are in a Wiltshire of the mind variously imagining the downs, pylons, motorway, Stonehenge in the distance and the village of Flintock where a St. George’s day fete is taking place, just off stage. The set helps – a grotty caravan in a littered clearing. But it represents a space only about twenty yards by thirty; the rest is as convincing a pull of the Cherry Orchard trick as I have seen. And if you are simultaneously pulling the Falstaff trick you are already in the realm of excellent theatre.

The plot is less important – and less impressive. The main theme is that the world is closing in on Rooster. There are petitions and court orders against him, irate fathers are after him and the local council is being pressed to act. We do not even see the inevitable conclusion. The sub-plots and minor characters include a rather lost “professor” researching something or other, Rooster’s estranged wife and child, a lad with ambivalent enthusiasm for the project leaving for Australia and the landlord of the local pub who is being micro-managed by the brewery and forced, among other things, to take up morris dancing. But plot is rarely the strength of good theatre – as a Shakespeare enthusiast I wouldn’t want to sell the bard on the basis of his plots which were usually purloined from someone else in any case.

From its Royal Court inception Jerusalem has received a torrent of praise. “Thrilling”, “mind-blowing” and “grand scale” are among the most common phrases and themes. In this country, as opposed to the USA the very limited amount of carping sees it as a specifically “white” play. (For the record, in the current production Rooster’s ex-wife and son are of mixed race.) It has moved with something like record speed into the world of Eng. Lit. syllabuses and study notes. I don’t want to dissent from the level of praise because Jerusalem is excellent and original theatre.

But – and it’s a very big but – many of the reasons critics have praised it have been political rather than theatrical and that has meant that much of what is written about it has been fatuous to a degree. There have been numerous descriptions of it as a “state of the nation” work. Andrew Marr, bizarrely, said “Jerusalem describes the Britain of right now” whereas almost everybody else sees it as a play very specifically about England. But Marr is a Scot who works mostly for the BBC. “Green and pleasant land” is a phrase quoted by many if not most critics usually with glee at the irony. This is not surprising because the Blake poem in which the phrase famously occurs is sung by Rooster’s mistress to Hubert Parry’s famous tune at the beginning of the play. But no critic I’ve read seems to realise that Blake was engaged in all kinds of irony and nobody remarks either on the dark satanic mills referred to in the poem.

It is extremely perverse to talk of the revival in terms of a state-of-the-nation because when it was written there was a Labour government and Brexit was but a dream; things are different now. In any case most of the ways in which critics see this story as representative of something about our times seem simply ridiculous. It is not about a lost rural way of life: that was lost two centuries ago when William Cobbett was writing about his Rural Rides. The period of rapid urbanisation after Waterloo was identified by the nationalist historian Sir Arthur Bryant as the time when “Old England” died. I remember someone joking in Worcestershire where we used to visit relatives when I was a child that they had been to a harvest festival attended by two hundred people of whom exactly two had been involved in bringing in a commercial harvest. The harvest festival itself was a dead tradition revived for middle-class use by late Victorian vicars.

The inter-war period of the last century was the time of maximum urban sprawl, bemoaned by George Orwell in Coming Up For Air. The countryside was never idyllic and never seriously believed to be so. In fact it is probably at its most idyllic now and Rooster’s chances of survival are greater than they have ever been – or they would be if he was real. For almost its entire history the English countryside has been a place of poverty and oppression whether we are talking about the enclosures of Cobbett’s time or the three generations of agricultural depression (caused by globalisation) which began in 1870. But right now it is inhabited by what an official of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (as it then was) called townsmen-in-the-country when I interviewed him as part of my very first research project in 1968. They have their pensions and their investments and for the most part thoroughly enjoy their rights of way, their village fetes and their garden produce. The countryside has never been happier, more complacent or more conservative. Predictably there are a lot of urban intellectuals who don’t understand that and would strongly disapprove if they did.

Blake’s annoying phrase “England’s green and pleasant land” can be used with multiple combinations of sincerity and irony. It is, for the most part, green and pleasant, but it isn’t either entirely green or entirely pleasant. I know a lovely path in Warwickshire based on an old railway line which is particularly good for foraging, but the car park at the north end of it is well known as a place to buy drugs – and therefore also features middle-class ladies ‘phoning the county’s tiny police force who generally aren’t very interested. And if it doesn’t seem very green or pleasant then walk on. Eventually, as my walking companion points out, you experience the wardrobe effect (as in C.S.Lewis’s Narnia): you leave a busy road and walk between some houses and before long you are in a world of woods and meadows and birdsong where the few people you meet will be friendly and interesting.

So I don’t see Jerusalem as being about some statement of where we are now and the reason I never bothered to go to the original production was that the critical response had convinced me it was essentially agitprop. It is about something much more interesting, the layered myths and realities of the land (most brilliantly explained by A.G. Hoskins in The Making of the English Landscape). If there’s a sense of loss and nostalgia it’s been there for at least three thousand years. I think the author understands this: he lives on a farm in Somerset and bemoans the time he wasted in London pubs.

Lincoln Allison July 2022