The Irish play rises again. Only this time it's in England

CULTURE SHOCK:I WROTE LAST WEEK about the way Dublin Theatre Festival had highlighted a crisis in the old notion of the literary play. But is this a temporary phenomenon or evidence of a more profound shift? Before writing the obituaries, it is worth noting that the most resonant cultural event in England at the moment is the return from Broadway to the West End of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem. I saw it in New York during the summer, and it is hard to think of a more powerful argument that there is life in the old beast yet.

Jerusalemis all the things that are supposed to be dead. It is three hours long. It is a state-of-the-nation piece. It is verbally rich. It is highly conscious of theatrical history. It draws both on the Greek unities (one day, one set, one story) and on Shakespeare. And it has at its heart an epic performance by Mark Rylance, an exercise in English heroic acting that takes you back not just to Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud but to David Garrick and John Philip Kemble. The context of the play may be obviously contemporary (indeed, in the week of the Dale Farm evictions, it is almost current affairs), but in form and effect Jerusalemis in a tradition of English theatre that goes back nearly 500 years.

In one sense, indeed, Jerusalemis positively archaic. Rylance's performance as Johnny "Rooster" Byron, the anarchic Traveller who gets an eviction notice from his woodland stand in the opening moments, is clearly that of the greatest actor of his generation. His physical presence, an impossible fusion of brokenness with an air of utter command, is matched by his vocal fluency, with its almost equally uncanny combination of naturalistic speech and lilting, gently rhythmic incantation. Decades of dedication to Shakespeare, of learning to build vast edifices from tiny details, have gone into the making of Rylance's performance. He is, at almost 50, at the very height of his career. Yet he is almost unknown beyond the reaches of the theatre audience. Why? Because he doesn't do television or films. He's the contemporary equivalent of a great writer who writes only in a minority language and bans all translations.

One could therefore see the appeal of Jerusalem as essentially nostalgic.

Atheists on holiday, after all, queue up to see great cathedrals; it doesn’t make them true believers. Going to see an astonishing performance of old-style theatre could be similar to visiting a craft workshop to watch a master thatcher or a great lacemaker: mesmerising in its own way but unconnected to the real world outside.

This notion isn't entirely wrong. Jerusalemdoes draw its power from very old notions of Englishness. It plugs into the feeling that the "real" England is located in the natural world, beyond the urban culture that has dominated the place for centuries. The wood in which all the action unfolds is Shakespeare's Forest of Arden. Byron is the Green Man. He's Robin Hood. He's the Lord of Misrule. Butterworth deploys all the atrophied symbols of Olde England: William Blake's Jerusalem, St George's Day, even morris dancing.

But, in fact, the play is not nostalgic at all. Byron’s antic spirit is not just set up as a simple contrast to the creeping soullessness of the housing estates that are squeezing his space out of existence. That would have made for a much less potent play and a much less complex performance.

Instead, Byron is a sacred monster. He is brave, reckless, funny and oddly regal – Falstaff and Prince Hal at the same time. But the thing that makes him so forceful is the same thing that makes him so repellent: he doesn’t care. The carelessness that makes him magnificent also makes him cruel, irresponsible, utterly self-centred.

The young people of the town are drawn towards Byron like children to the Pied Piper. But this is less a testament to his magnetism than it is to the poverty of their lives. Butterworth deploys Byron brilliantly as a kind of negative filter in which all the hopelessness and joylessness of the town is trapped. The point is not that Byron is a fabulous, charismatic leader but that he is, in many ways, pathetic. How desperate, the play asks, do things have to be for such a figure to be the shining beacon of authenticity and integrity? This is not a nostalgic question.

It’s undoubtedly the case that it is the immensity of Rylance’s performance rather than the richness and courage of Butterworth’s text that is drawing audiences in such numbers to Jerusalem. But, of course, the reverse is also true. It is the text that drew Rylance and that feeds the breathtaking energy with which he pushes all the way from the dirty realism of the beginning to the mad, ecstatic, incantatory ending.

If you’re Irish there is a particular kick in watching Jerusalem, for it reminds you of nothing so much as a Tom Murphy play: the attraction to the outsider, the operatic structure, the vocal arias, the daring leap from one level of reality to another, the dense undergrowth of myth, the notion of a play that is at once highly particular and an eccentric national epic. I’ve no idea whether Butterworth saw, for example, The Gigli Concert, but, if he did, he might have seen a kind of play that English theatre didn’t really have. Jerusalem has that feeling of English theatre catching up with the possibilities of the big, mad, verbose, unruly, impossible Irish play. It’s kind of funny that the English have discovered it just as the Irish seem to be losing faith in it. I remember a quote from New York to the effect that if you want an Irish cop these days, you hire a Puerto Rican. Just at the moment, anyway, if you want a classic Irish-style play, you have to go to London.