Jez Butterworth’s return to the Royal Court is a full-bloodied, joyous celebration and lament for a diminishing rural England whose wild pagan past is increasingly shackled by health and safety-obsessed councils and developers who tear down magical forests to put up bland estates.
It is set in a Wiltshire glade where Mark Rylance’s delicious dissolute Rooster is a pied-piper drug dealer who supplies the local kids with cocaine, hash and more protection than any pub peddling Bacardi Breezers ever could.
At three hours it is a minor miracle that Ian Rickson’s production does not feel over-long. But Butterworth puts a ticking clock on the action with the impending eviction of Rooster from his forest and his caravan. And then there are Rooster’s ever-entertaining and utterly believable tales; of English giants who stalk the land and a personal past that includes a career as Wiltshire’s very own bus-jumping Evil Knievel.
And in between there is the crackle of banter between Rooster — a role handmade for Rylance, our finest comic stage actor who has an unmatched air of danger about him — and his merry band consisting of Mackenzie Crook’s wannabe DJ and Alan David’s more than mad history professor. They are the ones on the drugs. But for me this was the best trip I’ve taken at the theatre in a long time.