Jez butterworth biography template

Rickson had a hunch that, “like a good chef, if I brought in the Rylance element we’d get in a domain that would really release the flow. And that’s what happened.” Back at the farmhouse, Rickson suggested that Rylance read aloud “Daffodils,” from Ted Hughes’s “Birthday Letters,” his final collection, which drew on his life with Sylvia Plath. It’s a poem about grief, making sudden turns from the gentle depiction of the couple picking flowers “among the soft shrieks / Of their jostled stems” to the savage foreshadowing of death: “wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth, / With their odourless metals.”

Rickson and Butterworth had spoken in the past of their admiration for Hughes, and “Daffodils,” in which human experience is rooted in the cycles of the natural world, overlapped with the themes of Butterworth’s play. Hearing Rylance read, Butterworth said, ignited an ambition to write something equal to Rylance’s talent. He renamed the play “Jerusalem,” after the William Blake poem, adapted by Hubert Parry into a popular hymn that is sung on St. George’s Day. It provides a sort of bathos: the grandest expression of Englishness is used to describe the goings on of a group of drifters.

“Had that not happened, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it,” he said of Rylance’s reading. “It had such a fundamental effect, because you were suddenly aware of what this person was capable of. You knew the second that it began that what you were hearing was the poem; it was the clearest transmission. It came through on the clearest frequency, and I had never experienced anything like it in my life. It was like hearing Aretha Franklin sing.”

If you missed “Jerusalem” when it was onstage, the only way to see it is to go to Blythe House, in West London, a grand outpost of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Butterworth doesn’t like plays on film—he compares them to “being told about a dinner party that you weren’t at”—and he ref

Biography

Walking past a copse with an abandoned caravan on a particularly derelict stretch of the Norfolk coast this summer, a friend commented: "How very Jerusalem". By which he meant, obviously, not the holy city, but the wooded patch of hinterland in south-west England brought so pungently to life in Jez Butterworth's smash-hit play. It's been a long time since a play had the power to take on its own life as an adjective. Jerusalem, with Mark Rylance as its modern-day high priest of anarchy, taking on Kennet and Avon council on St George's Day in an impoverished rural England still haunted by its ancient myths, has wormed its way into our national consciousness.

Butterworth today looks a far cry from the man who he admits used to convince himself that the creative muse could be found down the pub. Jerusalem added a Tony to its clutch of awards during its recent Broadway run; there are more plays in the pipeline and he has even just secured himself a permanent base in London (although his main home remains a pig farm in Wiltshire with his wife, Gilly, and his two daughters, aged five and two). Yet it is Jerusalem that will perhaps remain his greatest achievement – an intoxicating portrait of a nation almost subliminally trapped between the forces of old and new, chaos and officialdom, and steeped in an atavistic sense of rebellion and magic.

"When I wrote the first draft, in 2004, the problem with the play was that, actually, it was trying to be state-of-the-nation," he says, big and beardy with a beret perched improbably on his head. "It didn't have anything else. Now, looking back, I've got a lot more of a sense of why it came about the way it eventually did. I can now see things in it that were clearly possessing me at the time. I wasn't really trying to write about England particularly, although obviously I was writing about a certain community. But I was really trying to summon up an anxiety that I had about change. Not so