the hills of california (w. butterworth, d. mendes)

My brother said, do you want to go to the theatre, and I said why not. When in London, sometimes it feels like there’s no time to go to theatre: it takes up a whole evening and there are people to see and places to haunt. But as a night out with el hermano, it seemed ideal. And what better than that doyen of British theatre, Jez Butterworth’s latest.

I read nothing about the play beforehand. My expectations, as ever, were not high. The set had a polished, conservative feel. A meticulously rendered front room of a rundown Blackpool hotel. Emblematic, perhaps, but doggedly naturalistic. It declared: “You have arrived in a British theatre, do not expect to witness anything radical.” The audience didn’t look as though they had any desire to witness anything radical, so they were not going to be disappointed. We were up in the gods. I had actually checked out these tickets on-line earlier, and they cost around £70. My bother, as is his wont, had an app, so we got them for £15. The theatre was full. The show is a success.

What unfolded over the course of the next three hours was indeed an exemplary rendition of British theatre. The play is beautifully written, directed and acted. It has humour and pathos, The Andrews Sisters and the Rolling Stones. It is seemingly written for Butterworth’s wife, Laura Donnelly, who gives a grandstanding performance in a female-lead play. There’s a sniff of Chekhov, a faint hint of Pinter in the set-up, a dollop of Osbourne and a whole backlog of British (and Irish) playwriting. It’s one of those things that people in the arts, both here and abroad, will note that we ‘do well’. There’s next to no politics, nothing formally challenging, not even all that much emotion. But it all works like a cuckoo clock. 

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Nb - To be present in the Harold Pinter theatre, formerly known as the Comedy Theatre, is an event in itself. The Victorians had money and they had a grand, claustrophobic vision for how to spend it. The theatre is as intimate a cave, a cave with ledges and crannies and a religious focus on the event of the stage. The social complexity of the Victorian world is still functioning here, with the gods and the stalls, the balcony and the boxes. Even if your seat is half way to Piccadilly Circus, you will still get enough of an immersive view to feel like you are part of this great theatre machine, which is part of this splendiferous empire, a place of plush velvet and ornate ceilings. Just to be there is to belong to the victors. The quality of the show is entirely incidental. 

jerusalem (w butterworth, d. rickson)

A few general thoughts concerning this play.

Firstly, it's the third good piece of writing I've seen in London in the last month or so, following on from Apologia and Pornography. Which must be some kind of a record.

Secondly, have been musing since watching it on Monday whether it isn't a closetly intellectual piece of writing. This said because many of the main tenets of conventional dramatic storytelling aren't really adhered to. Byron doesn't go on much of a journey; he starts as a ribald Falstaffian figure and ends as a ribald, bloodied Falstaffian figure, albeit one moved to rage by his enemies. In a more conventional dramatic text (using the phrase in inverted commas), the interaction of the characters leads to some kind of learning, and whilst one or two of Byron's rats make half-hearted discoveries about themselves, they're still more interested in securing some whizz. In essence, the play functions as a manifesto for Byron's hedonistic Englishness. Rylance's performance is impressive, lending the old soak a demented gravitas, and his (and Butterworth's) vision of some kind of primordial Englishness emerges through a mixture of humour and grandiloquence.

Thirdly, the play, steeped in its Shakesperianism, reminds us of things that sometimes get forgotten. (In an era when scripts can almost be put together using spreadsheets.) Monsters make for great theatre (Byron also probably owes a debt to Tamburlaine). Theatre is about putting on a show, rather than education. Showmen put on the best shows, and a dash of lunacy doesn't go amiss either. In fact, in Jerusalem's genealogy, Marlowe plays as big a role as Shakespeare. The character who can unleash language, and play with it like a rapier or a rubik's cube, who can make language sit up and talk... That's a character people will always want to see, a writer people will always want to listen to.

I have only a vague idea of what Butterworth and Byron's Englishness truly represents - the manifesto wasn't altogether clear - but you kind of know you could listen to Byron spinning his tall tales all night.