Rooster is a good man,” says Ann Garner, who runs a Bath-based amateur-theatre company called Next Stage. “I mean, there’s the drink and the drugs, and he’s always blaring on, and he’s without any morals — but he’s loyal, he gives people a voice and he says the things we wish we could say, but have too much to lose if we do. Rooster has nothing to lose.”
Garner, 63, is an unlikely champion for Johnny “Rooster” Byron, the wild, swaggering, effectively homeless, almost certainly alcoholic Wiltshire troublemaker at the heart of Jez Butterworth’s instant 21st-century classic, Jerusalem. As a pillar of the Somerset community, Garner could almost be one of the village worthies keen for Rooster to be thrown off his unlicensed caravan site, to clean up the area and stop the all-night parties. Yet Garner recently directed a production of Jerusalem for the amateur company she heads — one of a surprising number of non-professional groups tackling this bawdy, filthy, drug- and booze-soaked riff on the wild heart of England — and fell completely in love.
“He’s so defiant,” she says. “He may be beaten half to death, but he’ll never walk off quietly and accept defeat. He really chimed with the Bath audience. The play is set about 40 minutes away, in Pewsey, and we had people coming up and asking if we’d changed the references to make the script sound local. I said no, the play was written to be performed somewhere just like this, by people like us.”
As, indeed, it has been. So far, the Solihull Society of Arts, Hertfordshire’s Bancroft Players, Kildare’s Silken Thomas Players, Leamington Spa’s Loft Theatre and a man known as Bill at the Occupy London camp by St Paul’s Cathedral have all staged versions — a remarkably quick turnaround for a play that only finished its second West End run in January. It’s scheduled for Newcastle’s People’s Theatre Arts Group in May and, fingers crossed, for Bromley Little Theatre, in south London, in the autumn. What’s the appeal of a difficult play about a bunch of dreamers and a wild gypsy drug dealer who falls foul of health-and-safety officers at the local council?
“It’s a wild journey through ancient and modern England, from weathered standing stones to William Blake, to losing one’s youth, to dope and booze, to Trivial Pursuit and gnomes in a wheelbarrow,” explains Gordon Vallins, 77, who directed the Leamington Spa production. “It hits a certain nerve — it appeals to the rebellious side of us.” Indeed, there’s a cheerfully iconoclastic streak running through each production, starting with the lead actor. Rylance’s Rooster has been hailed as the performance of a generation; Butterworth has suggested that no other professional actor could play the part. Ask the amateur companies, however, and they heap praise on Rylance, to be sure, then purse their lips, lower their voices and say: “Strictly entre nous...”
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Some suggest that there was a bit of overacting. Others that he might have drowned out the rest of the ensemble. A few think he missed the point of the character, delivering a fine show, of course, but not fully understanding the text. Each troupe has its own idea of Rooster, his message, his meaning and his essential qualities. Already, just a few months after the applause has died away, the part echoes more intensely than the performer.
In Bath, Garner directed the play as an ensemble piece, with Rooster as a constant in a sea of failure. The director of Bancroft Players, Jon Brown, went the other way, sending his lead, Keith Swainston, on a despairing journey of vulnerability and emotion. The Solihull production has Rooster as “a pirate punk Puck”, according to Steve Eagles, who based his interpretation on Joe Strummer, of the Clash; while Bill, who co-ordinated the readings at St Paul’s, found a performer who could well have been Rooster himself. “The part was read by an Irishman of roughly Johnny’s age, no fixed abode, a hurricane of drink,” he says. “He read quite fast, which the reading needed, and the beautiful thing was, he’d frequently realise how funny the line he was reading actually was, halfway through reading it, and would crack up laughing. I hoped he might be around for further readings, but I didn’t see him again.”
The groups disagree violently over the play’s ending, when Rooster beats a drum and calls on the giants of old England to rise up and save him from the police gathering nearby. Garner is appalled at the idea that anything spiritual follows — “Rooster doesn’t need a Lord of the Rings moment” — while Vallins added storms, thunder and a male choir singing a discordant version of the hymn Jerusalem, suggesting rising chaos and the possibility of something magical.
It’s not clear what plans Newcastle or Bromley have for their cast or staging — there seems to have been some confusion over the amateur rights. Butterworth’s agent released them before news of the recent New York and London revivals. There have been attempts to pull the rights for some productions, although, in a few cases — including the Solihull Society of Arts run and Bill from Occupy’s public performances — Butterworth has personally stepped in to ensure the performances went ahead.
His support reflects a growing trend in British theatre, as long-serving artistic professionals recognise the wealth of talent and enthusiasm in the amateur world — with 2,500 companies across the UK, and a total of 150,000 members. Ahead of autumn’s Sky Arts am-dram talent contest, Stagestruck, the Royal Shakespeare Company will be collaborating this summer with amateur groups on a project called Open Stages. The RSC — whose artistic director, Michael Boyd, insists that the best King Lear he has ever seen was in an amateur production — is opening its auditorium and expertise to help stage 174 productions of Shakespeare’s work, including an Anglo-Polish version of Romeo and Juliet, an all-female Hamlet from Milton Keynes and a sci-fi Twelfth Night in Huddersfield. There will be a Macbeth performed by torchlight in Coventry Cathedral, and the Royal Navy’s theatre society is staging Much Ado About Nothing in Portsmouth harbour.
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In May, BAC and WildWorks — the company behind Michael Sheen’s epic community performance of The Passion, which involved the entire population of Port Talbot last Easter — are staging the story of the Tower of Babel in Caledonian Park, north London, as part of the World Stages project, in collaboration with the Lyric Hammersmith, Theatre Royal Stratford East and the Young Vic. For 12 performances, professional actors will work with 500 community performers, including immigrant groups and the disability charity Connect.
WildWorks, a Cornish company, began collaborating with amateurs in the late 1990s, when a project in a quarry foundered because of the size of the space and some kids roaring around on dirt bikes nearby. “The actors were missing their entrances, so we asked the kids on bikes if they’d like to join the cast, carrying the actors on the back,” says Bill Mitchell, artistic director of WildWorks. The bikers ended up taking curtain calls, staying for the whole run and inviting their families down to see the play. For the Passion, they had a cast of 1,000, involving local choirs, gymnastic teams and am-dram groups — with amateur actors playing both God and Judas. “There’s a sense of ritual about a live theatre production,” Mitchell says. “People become part of the piece and don’t want it to end. We’re going back to Port Talbot for a reunion this Easter — you want to leave something in place.”
One thing that’s already in place is the amateur world’s appetite for adventurous shows. Although Jerusalem might seem a little hardcore for a scene traditionally associated with drawing-room comedies and a hearty panto, the play’s publisher, Nick Hern Books, showed me its list of top-10 play requests from amateur theatre companies in 2011. It was positively histrionic. Alongside Ladies’ Day and Be My Baby by Amanda Whittington — “There’s always a demand for strong female parts,” says Tamara von Werthern, the company’s performing-rights manager — there’s Dominic Cooke’s epic Arabian Nights, Diane Samuels’s harrowing Kindertransport, Fin Kennedy’s unsettling metaphysical treatise How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, and the ambitious physical theatre of 100, by Christopher Heimann, Diene Petterle and Neil Monaghan.
“It’s an interesting litmus test for a writer,” von Werthern says. “Amateur companies are interested purely in plot and character — character above all. They really get to know and love good characters. Some plays that make a lot of noise when they’re launched just don’t transfer because the characters are thin or poorly written. I think it’s a badge of honour for a writer to be embraced by the amateur world.”
Butterworth should thus be pleased at Rooster’s reception — and maybe a little more. As the cultural critic Raymond Williams pointed out, in Britain we celebrate the countryside and the wood, where everything is topsy-turvy and the normal rules break down. From A Midsummer Night’s Dream to The Recruiting Officer, pastoral plays have hinted at the tradition of the peasants’ revolt, that most English of revolutions.
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Amateur theatre’s representative body, the National Operatic and Dramatic Association, recently warned that the recession is affecting its members. When budgets are tight, your sub to the local theatre group is the first thing to go, along with big nights out. At the same time, cash-strapped councils are squeezing hall-hire prices for extra revenue. Am-dram players may be closer to Johnny Rooster than they imagine. If they are beating the drum to hold back the grey shades of boredom and conformity, the question is the one Rooster poses in Jerusalem’s final scene — what happens next? Will the giants come?
For information on the People’s Theatre’s Jerusalem, visit ptag.org.uk