He's a pie-eyed piper, a Peter Pan with a potbelly presiding over a Neverland that soon will be never more. The iconoclastic Johnny Rooster alternately lives in denial, recalls past glories, and thunders like a Shakespearean tragedian against unjust gods. And he parties with the abandon of a Falstaff and the aggressiveness of John Osborne's angry young men. Welcome to Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth's epic play set in an English countryside enclave that Johnny Rooster considers a holy land he is duty-bound to preserve.
San Francisco Playhouse is presenting the West Coast premiere of Butterworth's London and Broadway success in a raucously controlled production that shakes the auditorium. But what the three-hour-plus play is not is a tidy march to its thematic destination, often leaving the audience adrift in the meandering lives of the various hangers-on, angry villagers, and bureaucrats carrying eviction notices who make their ways to Johnny's demobilized mobile home. The playwright is clearly interested in building themes through the atmospheric accrual of meandering events, but the forward dramatic drive can be lost in the process.
"Jerusalem," a song set to a William Blake poem, is Britain's unofficial national anthem, imagining Jesus blessing the country for its sprawling green pastures, now being overtaken by "dark satanic mines" of the industrial revolution. This information, plus a four-page glossary included with the program, offers American equivalents of dozens of regional references and colloquialisms. "Squaddie," for example, is a derogatory terms for an off-duty soldier, whom you should probably not ask for "whizz," which are better known as amphetamines.
The play is set in the recent past, and may be the only angry-man play to come out of England in recent decades that does not invoke the name of Margaret Thatcher. The messages the play conjures are almost like smoke signals that cannot be comfortably categorized. Yes, bucolic pastures are more beautiful than the housing estates that will displace Johnny, so score one for the Rooster. But his caravan is also a way-station for a changing population of runaways and stoners, many of them underage, who score drugs and guzzle his whiskey. So officialdom wins back a point. And the ground continues to shift until Johnny himself loses faith in his dominion.
Director Bill English, who designed the realistic, cluttered set, has managed to create the impression of free-form chaos with the control needed in the sprawl of Butterworth's text. The play's anchor is obviously Johnny Rooster, and the production could go adrift without a performance like Brian Dykstra's ironclad grip on the role of a self-made icon who is variously a tyrant, a hero, a junkie, a drunk, a braggart, and a teddy bear. There are strong, distinctive performances from the surrounding characters, including Ian Scott McGregor, Joshua Schell, Paris Hunter Paul, and Richard Louis James as members of Rooster's lost-boy tribe, and from Christopher Reber as a costumed reveler promoting a local pub, Maggie Mason as Rooster's former girlfriend and mother of his young son, and Joe Estlack as a local thug on the prowl for his stepdaughter.
Sitting through Jerusalem can definitely be an intense theatrical experience, but I understand if you wonder at times just why you are having this particular experience.
Jerusalem will run at the San Francisco Playhouse through March 8. Tickets are $30-$100. Call 677-9596 or go to sfplayhouse.org.