Class, Culture and Tragedy in the Plays of Jez Butterworth

Sean McEvoy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030627102
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030627119
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama

Jez Butterworth is undoubtedly one of the most popular and commercially successful playwrights to have emerged in Britain in the early twenty-first century. This book, only the second so far to have been written on him, argues that the power of his most acclaimed work comes from a reinvigoration of traditional forms of tragedy expressed in a theatricalized working-class language. Butterworth's most developed tragedies invoke myth and legend as a figurative resistance to the flat and crushing instrumentalism of contemporary British political and economic culture. In doing so they summon older, resonant narratives which are both popular and high-cultural in order to address present cultural crises in a language and in a form which possess wide appeal. Tracing the development of Butterworth's work chronologically from Mojo (1995) to The Ferryman (2017), each chapter offers detailed critical readings of a single play, exploring how myth and legend become significantin a variety of ways to Butterworth's presentation of cultural and personal crisis.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

S. McEvoyClass, Culture and Tragedy in the Plays of Jez Butterworthhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62711-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Sean McEvoy¹

(1)

Brighton, UK

Sean McEvoy

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Jez ButterworthTragedyWorking-classMythology

End Abstract

Jez Butterworth’s position among contemporary British playwrights is distinctive, and perhaps unique. For one thing, he has become sure-fire box office success. The Ferryman (2017) was the fastest selling play in the history of The Royal Court Theatre and then ran for eleven months at the Gielgud, scooping three major ‘best play’ awards before transferring to Broadway and winning two Tony awards in 2019, including, once again, ‘best play’ (Royal Court Theatre 2017; Telegraph Reporters 2019). The original production of Jerusalem (2009) had a second West End transfer on its return from selling out in New York. This book is solely concerned with his writing for the stage, but it is significant that he is also a successful scriptwriter for high-profile films such as the James Bond film Spectre (2015) and Le Mans ’66 (2019), and also for the TV historical fantasy Britannia (Amazon and Sky 2018–2021). His most commercially successful plays have also depicted larger-than-life heroes and the supernatural, but in a very different mode: theatrical tragedy in its traditional form. Yet these plays, as their commercial success suggests, are very far from being art for the cultural elite. They are populated by working-class people speaking a high-energy and eloquent dialogue that stylistically owes a debt to the best of television situation comedy and to stand-up. The laughs keep coming almost to the end.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Butterworth’s explicit statements of political commitment are very rare.¹ But his plays articulate an underlying anxiety about profound political matters that speak to a wide audience in contemporary Britain. They are concerned with class, culture and identity. They examine our relationship with the past as expressed in the stories we tell about it. They are anxious about our relationship with the natural world and about the deracination and marginalisation of working people. ‘Theatres’, Butterworth told the writer Sarfraz Manzoor in an interview, ‘are churches. They’re places where you come along and you evoke anxieties and deal with these together. That’s what they’re for’ (Manzoor 2011). It is significant that a familiar narrative trope in Butterworth’s plays is the threat of violence looming offstage. In several the unseen enemy is the flattening power of a globalised economic system and its deadening deployment of instrumental reason against human worth and value. Situated in their non-urban pockets of space on the edge of things, Butterworth’s characters squabble and play, trying to find ways that connect the past with the present, struggling against any condition of postmodernity that seeks to erase distinctions of place and time. Traditional tragedy comes to be the means in which these concerns find their fullest expression.

The Writer and His Context

Jeremy Butterworth was born in 1969 and lived at first in Abbey Wood in south-east London. His father, John, worked as a lorry driver for the Co-op, but later became an Economics and Industrial Relations lecturer after winning a trade union scholarship to Ruskin College, the labour movement’s education institute in Oxford. He was also a contributor to Tribune, the left-wing Labour paper.² At the age of twenty John Butterworth had steered a landing craft on Omaha Beach on D-Day. According to his son, this was an experience which he could not talk about for fifty years. It was Jez’s mother Shena Malone (‘a big Pinter fan’, Butterworth 1998: 158), he declares, who instilled in him the confidence to become a writer. She worked as doctor’s receptionist. Both parents came from at least half-Irish families and both were lapsed Catholics. Jez, the second youngest, was one of five siblings, all of whom were to make careers in film or theatre. In 1975 the Butterworths moved to Chiswell Green, an estate near a motorway junction just outside St Albans.

Jez attended Verulam School, an all-boys comprehensive where his writing was encouraged by his English teacher, Don Jones. He says he took part in four school plays and only ever visited the theatre a few times, but in 1985 he saw his brother Tom in a student production of Brian Friel’s Translations at Cambridge University. Interviewed in 2017, Butterworth could not forget that evening: ‘It was amazing. I still get excited thinking about it now. It was just thrilling. It was like the thing I wanted to do’ (Rees 2017). In a 2019 podcast he recalled that ‘at the end of the cast party I knew what I wanted to do next’ (Royal Court 2019). In 1987 he followed his brother to Cambridge and began an English Literature degree at St John’s College.

Butterworth wrote four plays at university, one of which, Cooking in a Bedsitter, was co-written with Tom. A black comedy all of whose lines came verbatim from a Katherine Whitehorn cookery book, it was successfully performed at the Edinburgh Fringe. He became known, it seems, as an entertaining teller of tall stories in ‘The Maypole’ in Cambridge, a pub near St John’s, and claims to have gone to one lecture in three years. He also boxed for the university, later using that skill to good effect in a punch-up with the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

Apart from a very brief spell as an account manager at a Fitzrovia advertising agency, Butterworth plunged straight into a career as a full-time writer as soon as he graduated. One play he wrote at this time, Huge , went to the Edinburgh Festival in 1993, and became a film in 2010. Living on a tiny income (and some small sponsorship from a producer to write a play), in June 1994 he moved with his brother Tom to Pewsey in Wiltshire, a village apparently later fictionalised as Flintock in Jerusalem . Together they wrote the Channel Four film Christmas , which was broadcast in 1996. But by then Jez had already written Mojo .

Butterworth finished the play in January 1995 and it was immediately picked up by Stephen Daldry, the artistic director of the Royal Court. It opened in the main downstairs theatre at the Royal Court in July. Mojo was directed by Ian Rickson, in what was to be the beginning of a long collaboration between director and playwright. No other ‘first’ play had been mounted downstairs at the Royal Court since Look Back in Anger in 1956. It is perhaps significant that the immediate success of his first full-length play meant that Butterworth never went through the normal early-professional career process of learning his craft play-by-play, having to work with what agents and theatres felt was viable and current. Instead the lorry-driver’s son arrived as a successful playwright on a main London stage straight from a very traditional English degree which was focused on the literature of the past. The influence of that trajectory is clear in his work. Mojo won a whole sheaf of awards, and a film version followed, but no more plays until The Night Heron in 2002. The Red God was lost and never performed when the laptop on which it was written was stolen.

Butterworth has continued to write (often with his brothers Tom and John Henry) for film and television, including script work on big franchise products such as the James Bond film Skyfall (2012). Although this study is dedicated solely to his work for the stage, film for Butterworth is equally his ‘first love’. Mojo became a film in 1997 before he wrote any further plays. ‘I love that I’ve got two passions,’ he told an interviewer in 2017, ‘and two different like, as it were, forms of the game. Actually no, they’re not even the same game … And I love going from one to the other and I find that if I move from one to the other I’ve got twice as much energy as I thought I would have rather than half of it’ (Rees 2017). ‘But in the end’, he told Simon Stephens in a 2019 podcast, ‘theatre is a hundred times more vital than the cinema—but also a hundred times more likely to let you down … you’re being asked something completely different’ (Stephens 2019).

The Winterling (The Royal Court 2006) and Parlour Song (Almeida 2008) followed to mixed reviews, but the commercial and critical success of Jerusalem (2009) was remarkable. An early version of the play, called St George’s Day, had been written in 2003 (the script, Butterworth claims, ended up in the bin outside the Royal Court). Traces of Jerusalem can be seen in all the plays written in the interim. Jerusalem ran for two years in London and New York, winning many awards for its writer and for Mark Rylance in the lead role of Johnny Byron (Rylance , who had seen the first draft, had been instrumental in encouraging Butterworth to complete the project). The intimate, small-scale The River at the theatre upstairs at the Royal Court followed in 2012. His most recent play, as I write, is The Ferryman (2017).

Butterworth’s dramatic writing does not always sit tidily in the context of his times, although it is clearly informed by them. Mojo was initially seen by critics to be part of a new wave of drama whose hallmarks were ‘a sensibility which was characterised by explicit portrayals of sex and violence, with a fresh directness of expression, rawness of feeling and bleakness of vision’ (Sierz 2011: 21), apparently typified by Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996). None of this really applies to Butterworth’s first play as I argue below (see pp. 35, 58), but the dramatist’s age and energy led to him being categorised as part of the ‘in-yer-face’ movement—though, as Mel Kenyon, the agent of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill remarked, ‘there’s no movement. […] There was a moment’ (Cited in Lane 2010: 20).

‘In-yer-face’ theatre was accused of sensationalism and of an obsession with style co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Yakkety Yak: Mojo (1995)
• 3. Exclusion from the Garden: The Night Heron (2002)
• 4. Homage: The Winterling (2006)
• 5. Drought: Parlour Song (2008)
• 6. The Enchanted Wood: Jerusalem (2009)
• 7. Time, Myth and Power: The River (2012)
• 8. Allusion: The Ferryman (2017)
• Back Matter