Mark Rylance in Jerusalem: return of a theatrical hero

THEATRE actor Mark Rylance must be getting bored with reading stellar reviews for Jerusalem. The star of Jez Butterworth's remarkable play has enthralled audiences and critics in London and New York ever since it opened in July 2009.

Now, after a four-month run on Broadway and a best actor Tony Award for Rylance, it's back in London and Rylance is once again getting stunning reviews for his portrayal of the trashy yet magnetic Johnny 'Rooster' Byron.
 
After Monday's opening night at the Apollo, Charles Spencer writes in The Daily Telegraph: "Watching him is like watching a great jazz musician hitting an amazing streak of improvisation".
 
Byron is a former stunt-man who inhabits the woodlands of Wiltshire, attracting the dregs of society who quickly become caught up in his magic. The bid to evict him echoes this year's Dale Farm case, making the play feel strikingly modern, while the rich use of myth evokes the England of yesteryear.
 
Jerusalem's director, Ian Rickson, believes that Rylance is perfect for the role because he is "steeped in symbolism, imagination and ritual. There are very few actors who are able to be male and also have a poetic dimension." Indeed, Butterworth moulded the script around Rylance once he knew he would take the part.
 
Rylance is, the Telegraph's Spencer gushes, "an actor of indisputable greatness, giving the most thrilling performance it has ever been my privilege to witness".
 
Libby Purves of The Times is equally seduced by his "mercurial magnetism". She notes that the play is so well written that it will "outlast even its remarkable star" - though it is "hard to imagine anyone but Rylance handling it".
 
This is the kind of praise that Rylance, now 51, has been winning ever since the play began in the summer of 2009. Explaining the decision to give him the Evening Standard Award for best actor in 2009, judge and theatre critic Georgina Brown said, "Very occasionally, a performance is so charismatic, so mercurial, so complete and compelling that it doesn't look like acting. Instead, it is a total embodiment of a character."
 
But perhaps the most fitting review comes from Rylance himself, who described the play to The Times as "satisfying a hunger in audiences for wildness and defiance. There's a feeling afterwards that they've eaten something they haven't eaten for years, something they've forgotten that's really needed for their health." ·