Jez Butterworth finally arrives at ‘Jerusalem’

Reporting from New York —

Just before his death, Frank Malone felt compelled to summon his grandson Jez Butterworth to the garden of the family house in Wiltshire, England, and pour out the accumulated wisdom of his years. He told him to never stop writing, to roll with the punches, to laugh at himself and the world, and left him with the coda that “.... girls, my boy, are wondrous … No man ever lay in his coffin wishing he’d made love to one less woman.”

“I must’ve been all of 8,” Butterworth says with a laugh nearly three decades later.

That final line appears almost verbatim in “Jerusalem,” the 42-year-old playwright’s sprawling epic about a onetime daredevil, Johnny “Rooster” Byron, who dispenses drugs and a wisdom of sorts to a motley crew of young people in a Wiltshire park. The Broadway drama, imported from London’s Royal Court Theatre, received rave reviews and six Tony nominations, including one for English actor Mark Rylance’s performance as a Falstaffian antihero whose bacchanals have earned him the enmity of the village constabulary. It is also a contender for best play in the ceremony Sunday night.

When the play opens, the officers are serving an eviction notice on the illegal squatter at his mobile home, complete with live clucking chickens, a tortoise and a mother lode of illegal substances.

The title of the play comes from a popular English hymn by Hubert Parry set to the poem by the mystical William Blake, which was sung at the recent royal wedding. Its searching lyrics echo Rooster’s feverish evocation of a lost world of giants and virgin births.

When asked about the mythic and atavistic nature of his work, Butterworth says, “My job is just to say the following: ‘We’re only here for a brief moment and we’re going to really struggle… to change, to move onto other versions of ourselves. What are you going to learn? I’m of no use to you in that. I can only point out that “other thing,” the wind that blows under the door, the wind you can’t identify, the one that is completely brutal and merciful at the same time.’”

Sitting in Bar Centrale, a Broadway watering hole, Butterworth comes off less as a deep thinker than as an affable drinking companion, describing the amulets hanging around his neck, which include a fish (“because I’m Pisces”), a penknife found in Los Angeles, a compass from Japan, a stone from the Mojave desert, a buffalo from Buffalo, N.Y., and a medal of St. Anne, “the patron of mothers.”

The Cambridge graduate is obviously well traveled, especially after “Mojo,” his 1995 black comedy about the denizens of a low-life Soho London club, brought him international recognition and the opportunity to direct a film version of it two years later. He followed up that film by directing and co-writing with his brother Tom the 2001 film “Birthday Girl,” starring Nicole Kidman and produced by yet another Butterworth brother, Steve.

They were raised, along with two other siblings, in the city of St. Albans in Wiltshire, just north of London, by iconoclastic parents who slept with a skull under their bed. It was a remnant of Butterworth’s mother’s dental nurse studies before she met and married his father. John Butterworth was a truck driver who, at 42, studied at Oxford on scholarship and eventually taught trade union law. The seminal event of his life, however, saw action on D Day, a war experience that would give him an embattled view of life.

Though Butterworth describes the theater as “church” and writing as a vocation, his parents dropped their profoundly Catholic upbringing early on.

Nevertheless Butterworth was attracted to the ritualistic if not sacramental and found it among the colorful eccentrics who populated his town. Among them was Ginger Mills, who went around dressed as a cowboy with hat, guns, giant belt buckle, boots and all and who, like Rooster Byron, gave the finger to the local authorities who tried to dislodge him from his illegally parked bus. Although Rooster was, in part, inspired by Ginger, the playwright maintains that the character largely stems from the anarchical elements within himself.

“I wouldn’t be able to write it otherwise,” he says, adding that he also closely identifies with — and has an affection for — Rooster’s pagan flock, all of whom stand on the cusp of change in their young lives.

“Every one is either running away from something or trying to create something, standing on a cliff, daring themselves to jump off into the unknown,” says Butterworth.

Butterworth says that he was on a cliff himself with “Jerusalem” at one point. “It was an overstuffed bird which refused to fly,” he recalls. And so he put it in a drawer and instead worked on his script for “Fair Game,” the Sean Penn-Naomi Watts movie about the Valerie Plame political scandal.

What reignited his interest was a visit from Rylance, who recognized in the play a rough masterpiece. “At 51, I’m so tired of intellectual ideas and academia,” says the actor. “And so the very bones and muscles of Jez’s language struck me as beautifully visceral. And yet he writes with a great sense of story, of suspense and revelation.”

Butterworth says that if he had the guts to finish the play, he owes a good deal to the late Harold Pinter who along with the late directors Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack formed a triumvirate of mentors. Like Butterworth’s grandfather, Pinter also delivered a valedictory to his protégé. “He was telling me to be completely fearless and to be ready to sacrifice everything,” he says.

Despite the temptations of Hollywood — he is working on a biopic of Robert Capa, the great war photographer with director Michael Mann — he is intent on staying the course Pinter challenged him to. He lives with his wife, Gilly, and his two young daughters in Somerset on a farm where he struggles daily with the question that has haunted him since he began writing.

“I’ve never had a problem writing dialogue,” he says. “I could always create a lot of heat. But how do you create light? And if you take that to an extreme position, Harold’s challenge, that doesn’t necessarily lead to behaving well. I mean I’ve had conversations with friends where they think I’ve gone absolutely crazy.”

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