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by Jez Butterworth, directed by Mitchell Cushman

Outside the March & Company Theatre with Starvox Entertainment, Streetcar Crowsnest, Toronto

February 15-March 17, 2018

“And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?”

(from “Jerusalem” by William Blake)

Outside the March and Company Theatre, two of Toronto’s most exciting independent theatre companies, have combined to present the Canadian premiere of the fantastic play Jerusalem  The play and the production are fantastic in every sense of the word.  Not only is British writer Jez Butterworth’s play one of the very best of the plays of the last decade, but it is extravagant in structure and imagination and literally concerns the nature and importance of myth.  Director Mitchell Cushman and his design team have risen to the challenges of this gargantuan play and created a production that is an extraordinarily inventive alternative to the play’s original production in 2009.  The play may be more than three hours long, but with Kim Coates completely inhabiting the formidable central character, you become so engrossed in the action that the time flies by.

One of many amazing feats Butterworth has accomplished in Jerusalem is to fashion such a long but engrossing play from a mere scrap of a plot.  The story is simple.  Johnny “Rooster” Byron has been living in a caravan without a permit in the part of the forest near the (fictional) North Wiltshire village of Flintock for 27 years, so long that the spot is known locally as “Byron’s Forest”.  Like everywhere else in the world, even the land in Flintock is being overtaken by condos.  New condos have been built so near Byron’s caravan that the noise from his all-night parties and the illicit activities that go on there have generated complaints from his new neighbours.  Byron has ignored the six eviction notices he has been served and at the start of the play he is given notice to evacuate his property within 24 hours after which time he will be forcibly evicted and his property bulldozed.  The action covers the 24 hours after Byron receives the notice.  The play’s primary source of tension is whether he will or will not evade his fate.

The story of the eviction of an older man holds our interest because Butterworth adds increasing amounts of detail both to who Byron really is and to what he symbolically represents.  On one level, Byron is a former Evel Knievel-like daredevil who used to make his living travelling to local fairs and jumping various chasms and quantities of buses in his motorcycle.  In the course of his career he is said to have broken every bone in his body.  The teenagers of the village are drawn to him because is renowned as a flouter of convention.  He entertains the kids with all-night parties where drugs, alcohol and sex are all freely available.

While Butterworth gives us increasingly unusual details about Byron’s real life, he simultaneously mixed in details that make Byron much more than a portrait of an eternal rebel but a symbol of the nation Britain used to be.  The story is set on St. George’s Day when Flintock has a celebratory fair in honour of Britain’s patron saint.  Byron’s caravan, grungy as it is, is painted with the red St. George’s cross.  From a semi-dotty professor who wanders through we learn the reason why St. George slew the dragon so associated with him.  The people of a town menaced by the dragon were ordered to sacrifice their children to pacify the beast.  St. George is thus both overturns a law and rescues children and Byron is associated with both deeds. 

When his teenaged followers are recovering from their revelries, Byron entertains them with stories, often extraordinarily tall tales.  One of the tallest of these, in more ways than one, is Byron’s story of how he met the 90-foot tall giant who built Stonehenge.  Byron still has an ancient drum inscribed with runes that he claims the giant gave him.  This comes across as the most far-fetched of Byron’s stories, but anyone who knows of the earliest histories of Britain will see that Butterworth is again linking Byron to the island’s mythic past.  The 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth claims that when the first settlers of Britain arrived from Troy (Britain being founded just as was Rome by a Trojan exile), they found the island inhabited by giants.  Two giants, Gog and Magog, later mentioned in the play, are mentioned in Geoffrey’s chronicle.     

Structurally, Byron serves as the centre for a series of stories that Butterworth weaves together about the many teens and adults who know him.  The most important of these is Ginger (Philip Riccio), the youth who has stood by Byron the longest.  He enjoys debunking Byron’s stories but, because he was an eye-witness, he supports the most miraculous of all – that Byron died after a failed stunt and rose from the dead. 

Among others in Byron’s sphere is Lee (Christo Graham), a teenager who will be leaving for Australia the next day.  Tanya (Brenna Coates) offers to show him a good time before he leaves, and the question is whether he will give in to her offer or not.  There is also the Professor (Nicholas Campbell), much the worse for wear, perpetually looking for the dog he lost in the woods; Wesley (Daniel Kash), a pub owner, who has barred Byron from his pub, forced into being a Morris dancer at the fair; and Dawn (Diana Donnelly), a former girlfriend of Byron’s, who wishes to take their 6-year-old son Marky (Evan Kearns) to the fair.  On the negative side there is Troy (Jason Cadieux), the step-father of Phaedra (Shakura Dickson), the May Queen, whom Troy suspects Byron is keeping captive in his caravan when, in fact, she is hiding there from Troy’s sexual abuse.

Butterworth thus paints an incredibly rich world on stage with Byron as its nexus.  Cushman and his design team have created a production that in many ways is superior to the original London production.  That was presented on a proscenium stage, whereas Cushman’s is totally immersive.  The audience sits on three sides of Byron’s plot of land, which includes a real caravan.  The front row of seats is made up of mismatched armchairs and beat-up sofas just like those in the playing area which Blais has made to look like an authentic rubbish tip.  And, most marvellous of all, Nick Blais has created a forest of four floor-to-ceiling trees with fairy lights strung from tree to tree.  Though it is only February, it’s hard to believe you will see a more lifelike and detailed set on any stage this year. 

Half an hour before the play itself begins, Cushman stages the end of one of Byron’s all-night parties with flashing lights and lasers to rave music by Richard Feren to give us a taste of what has so enraged the owners of the new condos.  Cushman shows that it is not all fun.  Brawls break out sometimes among the dancers.  But what is clear is that the participants are experiencing an ecstatic communal experience that while it lasts takes them out if their dead-end village lives to have a taste of bliss. 

The play lives or dies based on the performance of the actor playing Johnny Byron, and the two companies involved have managed to persuade Saskatoon-born Kim Coates to return to the stage after an absence of almost 30 years.  Coates has been steadily employed in Hollywood in projects for the big and small screens, but the grandeur of his performance as Byron can only make us feel that the Canadian stage has been the weaker for his absence.  Coates completely inhabits his character including the increasing mystery and symbolic significance he acquires.  Limping about the stage with his chest thrust out, he shows us how Byron gained the nickname of “Rooster”.  But Coates insures that we are never quite certain what kind of man Byron is.  Except for one significant moment, Byron never looks anyone in the eye as if always suspicious of danger or perhaps still high on drugs and alcohol or both.  Coates’s approach is to have Byron preside over his realm as one among equals with his crowd rather than as its overlord.  It’s an extraordinarily detailed and intense performance of the highest calibre that will not be soon forgotten.

No other character of the ensemble of 14 matches the power of Coates as Byron, but then none are meant to.  Philip Riccio is an excellent Ginger, a young man who claims to be a DJ, even though he has never had the chance to prove it.  DJing would be the one time Ginger would have of simulating the kind of ecstatic revelry that his model Byron so effortlessly produces.  Riccio shows well how envy and self-disgust mingle in Byron’s oldest follower, a teen who has refused to admit he has grown up.

Christo Graham gives a fine performance as Lee, a likeable but slightly dim teen who torn between the fact that he must leave and the desire for his life to stay the same.  Nicholas Campbell turns the Professor into a richly imagined character, filled with useless information yet compelled to display it to anyone who will listen as if to prove his own worth.  As Byron’s former girlfriend Dawn, Diana Donnelly has two brief but important scenes with Byron.  In one, Byron forces Dawn to gaze deeply into his eyes.  Donnelly’s expression magically changes completely from one of scepticism to one of awe.  What she sees in his eyes we never find out, but her reaction signals that Byron may command more than human power.

Of Byron’s opponents, Michael Spencer-Davis as Mr. Parsons and Kieran Sequoia as Ms. Fawcett make a comic pair of council officials – she the dominant and more forceful of the two, he given to cowering before Byron’s torrents of threats and insults.  Jason Cadieux’s Troy is another matter.  In just a few words combined with his body language, Cadieux demonstrates that Troy is both a dangerous bully and a coward and in life is more morally reprehensible than Byron ever could be.

The action of Jerusalem moves towards a thrilling, near mystical conclusion that will knock the breath right out of you.  This is a play conceived on a large scale and has a commensurately enormous impact.  Despite its length, it’s a great work that one can easily see more than once just to be able to appreciate more fully the text’s richness of allusions and intertwining of themes.  We have to be grateful that Outside the March and The Company Theatre could with the help of Starvox Entertainment stage such a massive theatrical experience in Toronto and do so with such confidence and insight.  We should be grateful too that they have found in Kim Coates one of the few actors in North America who could fill a role requiring such enormous stamina, intensity and ability to utter Butterworth’s poetic but profanity-laced language as if it issued forth from an ancient oracle.  This is a play and a production no theatre-lover should miss.

       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a version of a review that will appear later this year in Opera News.

Photos: (from top) Kim Coates as Johnny “Rooster” Byron; Christo Graham, Kim Coates, Philip Riccio and Peter Fernandes; Nicholas Campbell and Kim Coates; Kim Coates and Diana Donnelly; Kim Coates and Philip Riccio. ©2018 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets, visit www.crowstheatre.com.