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Posted: Thursday 19 January, 2012
Next Stage is one of the first amateur companies to do Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem that opened at the downstairs theatre of the Royal Court in London in 2009.
In fact the play opens in Bath only a week after the professional show closed in London.
The original production starred Mark Rylance as Johnny "Rooster" Byron and Mackenzie Crook as Ginger.
After receiving rave reviews its run was extended and, in January 2010, it transferred to the Apollo Theatre.
So just how did Ann Garner, artistic director at Next Stage, get hold of the rights?
Ann says: "The rights for the play are with Nick Hern Books and we have a good track record with them. For example we were the first amateur company to get the rights for both parts of His Dark Materials and indeed Next Stage features in a recently published American book on HDM.
"I was invited to do an interview on how we had staged it and toured it in 2007."
Jerusalem, which carries a warning that it can shock, contains strong language and has themes of an adult nature.
It is set on St George's Day and opens on the morning of a local county fair (deriving its sense of place and community from the annual carnival week at Pewsey, Wiltshire).
Johnny "Rooster" Byron, local waster and modern day Pied Piper, is a wanted man, The council officials want to serve him an eviction notice, his son, Marky, wants his dad to take him to the fair, Troy Whitworth wants to give him a serious kicking and a motley crew of mates want his ample supply of drugs and alcohol.
The play makes frequent allusions to Blake's eponymous poem from which its title is derived.
Jez Butterworth's comic contemporary vision of life in England's green and pleasant land is compelling and still hugely topical theatre.
It gives voice to the dispossessed and the disaffected in the person of Rooster, a shockingly familiar modern day Everyman played for Next Stage by actor Tim Evans.
The play's performance is a bit of a seventh birthday celebration for the Mission too and Ann announced only this week that while they were working on the dressing rooms extension they had decided they may as well go the whole hog and install air conditioning too.
Good theatre may set the pulse racing and scenes may be theatrically steamy but the climate in the auditorium will soon be as temperate as you like.
Jerusalem opens next Tuesday January 24 and runs each night until Saturday at 7.30pm.
- Christopher Hansford, Bath Chronicle 19/1/12