Songs from the Wood: New Theatre’s Jerusalem

Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem is a twenty-first century pastoral hymn to a mythic England, a country fast disappearing under the greedy clutches of urban sprawl and gentrification, and is filled with an anarchic sense of life and carpe diem, of grabbing life by the horns and riding it until it stops. Consider, then, that the play was written in 2009, and despite being the subject of four subsequent seasons in London’s West End and on Broadway, this is it’s Australian premiere production at Newtown’s New Theatre.

Jerusalem tells the story of Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, a man who has lived in his caravan in the Wiltshire forest for close to thirty-odd years, becoming in the meantime something of a local legend, a rite of passage, and a surrogate father-figure to many local teenagers in his time. But on the morning of April 23, St George’s Day, a reckoning has been heard – he has twenty-four hours to vacate the land he is squatting on, or risk forcible extraction and imprisonment.