Peripeteia

There are several of the Royal Court's trademark "in your face" shock tactics and an exceptionally high swear word count even by the exacting standards of the address, this rich three-hour play is also tender, touching, and blessed with both a ribald humour and a haunting sense of the mystery of things. — The Daily Telegraph
Jerusalem is a bold, ebullient and often hilarious State-of-England or (almost) State-of-Olde-England play... [Johnny] is a shrewd, bold, defiant, charismatic, even mesmeric man born out of his time. Imagine King Arthur reincarnated as a troll and you have something of the quality he brings to the debased pastoral he grittily, comically and finally mournfully inhabits. — The Times

Rylance is magnificent in a hugely demanding role, and restores one's faith in the power of theatre to make a really beautiful noise and on a scale that is both epic and potentially popular. — The Independent[10]

Following a successful run at London's 380-seat Royal Court theatre, Jerusalem transferred to London's West End at the 796-seat Apollo Theatre for a limited 12-week season from 28 January 2010, closing on 24 April 2010. There it received its first negative review. Tim Walker in the Sunday Telegraph wrote of the character of Rooster: "With his chest out and his head back, lined up in a vertical line with his bottom, the actor does indeed resemble a rooster. The problem with the term 'local personality,' however, is that it is all too often a polite euphemism for a crushing bore, and three hours in Rooster's company does prove to be something of an endurance test."

Jerusalem, then, admits to various readings. What’s not in dispute, though, is that, for all his disreputability, the “Rooster” is an indigenous force – his roots are nourished by ancient blood. And he’s as under threat as those brave tribespeople the Na’vi in Avatar. For the Royal Court to stage a play that gives us the low-down on rustic life is one thing – a strangely radical gesture from a theatre that has long favoured urban affairs. But for it to present the spectacle of a ‘true’ Englishman as the last of a doomed species borders on something which, for all the comedy, I found disquieting when watching it recently in the company of a mixed-race audience. We’re an explosive whiff away from the sentiment: ‘England for the English!’

Dominic Cavendish, ‘Why No Fuss About This Radical Play?’, Daily Telegraph, 23 February 2010, accessed on-line at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/7265867/Jerusalem-why-no-fuss-about-this-radical-play.html on 5 July 2015.

Jerusalem then, is real. The plasterer, the DJ, the weekend drug dealer, the ex-squaddie looking to work abroad, the bored slaughterman - are mainstream figures in the real English workforce and down the real English pub: two million ecstasy tablets are taken in Britain every week; one in eight young people are not in work, education or training; 15% of all households claim in-work benefits. Also real is the effing and blinding which seems to have uniformly discomforted the mainstream theatre critics: the swear-word count in Jerusalem is actually low compared to reality, and the swearing is generally genial, compared to reality where it is often aggressive, racist and violent. This, then, is the real English spoken by something close to the majority of real people: it's an indictment of the state of theatre […] that the language of Jerusalem is seems so challenging to theatregoers and critics alike. For this alone Jerusalem will go down as one of the great plays of the decade.

Paul Mason, ‘Butterworth’s Jerusalem: The Full English’, 18 December 2009, www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason