Jez Butterworth Reads The ‘Jerusalem’ Passage He Found Hardest To Write
4/14/20266 min
For the April edition of the Service95 Book Club, Dua Lipa sits down with playwright Jez Butterworth to discuss his modern masterpiece, Jerusalem. If you’ve never read a play before, this is the place to start.
With its raw, visceral portrait of myth, rebellion and a nation wrestling with its own identity, it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest British plays of the 21st century.
In this special video, Jez Butterworth reads a powerful excerpt from the play featuring Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron dispensing life advice to his young son Marky – a rare father-son moment filled...
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First 90 secondsJez Butterworth· Guest0:00
[gentle music] So the bit I'm about to, uh, read was at that point in two thousand and nine, the hardest thing I'd ever attempted to write, and I don't really know why. I just-- It was a massive challenge for me, but that's where you wanna be. It happens at a point in the play where Rooster has just been savagely beaten by three or four of the villagers. And as he's lying prone and damaged, his son, who has appeared earlier in the play, he was a very young boy, just reappears. And there's a short exchange before this, but he gets him to sit on a drum in the clearing, and he has, I think, probably just a couple of minutes to give him life advice, father to a son. Marky sits on the drum. "There. Now, there's something I'm gonna tell you. Your mum won't like this, so listen hard, because I'm only telling it once." He lights a cigarette, wipes his nose, and shows Marky. "See that? That's blood. And not just any blood. That's Byron blood. Now listen to me, and listen good, because this is important. I used to jump across Wiltshire, southwest, all over. One day here, ten thousand people showed up. In Stroyer's Field,