Jerusalem (NHB Modern Plays) (Royal Court Theatre) [Paperback]

Unarguably one of the best dramas of the twenty-first century --Guardian

A new play of irrepressible energy, wonderful wit and wild wonder. --Sunday Express

An invigorating, yelping, defiant portrait of 21st century shires England. --Daily Mail

Proves to be even better than its ecstatic publicity suggests. --Independent

Refreshing, humane, touching and wickedly funny. --Evening Standard

Spellbinding, exuberant and glowingly atmospheric. --Time Out

An instant modern classic. --Daily Telegraph

A hilarious, enchanting, affecting evening...one of the juiciest roles in living memory --The Times

A riveting hymn to England. --Daily Express

This play, this production, this performance are sensational. --The Financial Times

Jerusalem will surely wind up trailing trophies like pots on a tinker's wagon. And it's easy to see why. --Daily Mail

Jerusalem is a great frame-busting play that still exists solidly within a conventional framework. It could have been written in almost any year from the 1920s onward. Yet this work takes you places distant, out-of-time places that well-made plays seldom do. And it thinks big transcendently big in ways contemporary drama seldom dares.

One of the indispensable things that art does is find grandeur in unexpected places. Shakespeare saw it in a fat, craven gourmand named Falstaff; Mr. Butterworth and Mr. Rylance have located it in another hedonist and fabulist. While refusing to make him heroic, or even likable in any traditional sense, Jerusalem persuades us to accept Johnny as one of the last of the titans, a man who taps our lust for life lived large and excessively, without social restraints. He incarnates the spirit of a mythic England that may never have been but that everyone, on some level, longs for.

We theatergoers too are starved for a sense of the mythic, for performances we can talk about with glassy-eyed rapture in the years to come. Mr. Butterworth, Mr. Rickson and Mr. Rylance have provided us with that opportunity. Except in this case the mythic is no mere myth. Mr. Rylance also captures to a degree I can imagine no other contemporary actor doing Johnny's vast, vital, Falstaffian appetite for pleasure, for independence, for life itself. His Johnny Byron is truly a performance for the ages. --New York Times

I hope that the majority of people who haven't had the chance to see Jerusalem might get enough of a dim, distant echo to perhaps go out and read the play. --Andrew Marr on BBC News

JEZ BUTTERWORTH'S NEW PLAY THE RIVER WILL PREMIERE AT THE ROYAL COURT IN OCTOBER 2012 AND IS PUBLISHED BY NICK HERN BOOKS. His previous plays, Mojo, The Night Heron and The Winterling were all premiered at the Royal Court. Another new play, Parlour Song, opened at the Almeida Theatre in Spring 2009. His films (as writer and director) include Mojo and Birthday Girl, starring Nicole Kidman. All of these plays are available in single editions and in a collection Jez Butterworth Plays: One, published by Nick Hern Books.