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Audiences were on their feet, cheering again, this weekend at the Royal Court. Five days since the opening night of The Ferryman, Paddy Considine and his fellow cast members by now must be accustomed to the hammering applause at the end of Jez Butterworth's new play.

Arriving on stage as a lovingly tooled, gleaming artefact, his three-hour saga of politics and family life in rural Northern Ireland has already been adjudged a modern masterpiece. For achieved ambition, it equals his great 2009 hit , most critics agree.

The playwright had promised another big play and, by any metric, he has delivered. With a cast of 23, The Ferryman has become the fastest-selling production in the 60-year history of the Royal Court. The Guardian's Michael Billington sees it as "a rich, serious, deeply involving play about the shadows of the past and the power of silent love", while Ben Brantley of the New York Times found it "fiercely gripping". The Observer's Susannah Clapp has also pronounced it an outstanding new play: "profligate, boisterous, far-reaching".

As well as providing fun, drama and a clear chart of the dark pressures on Catholic republican families during the Troubles, Butterworth's The Ferryman also traces the treacherous dynamics of family dialogue.

Near the end of Act One, Aunt Pat, the bitter old revolutionary of the piece, appears to be innocently praising a pie she has been made: "It was so succulent. It's making my mouth water just to recall it." Yet the audience knows her words are a nasty dig at a deep sexual rivalry between two younger women.

Butterworth has spoken of the weight he gives "characterisation", which he believes "needs a resurgence" in general: "It used to belong in big storytelling and it has just dropped out of it."

Under the directorship of Sam Mendes, the new production has, perhaps not surprisingly, a filmic sweep. But despite his time spent in film (including work with Mendes on the last two Bond films), Butterworth still has a firm hold on theatrical structure.

West End impresario Sonia Friedman, who co-produced, says she knew it was "an instant classic" from the opening pages of a first draft. "My heart was thumping and I couldn't quite believe what I had in my hands," she told the Observer this weekend. "This is what it must have felt like to work on a new play by Chekhov, O'Casey or Tennessee Williams. And there I was, with this jewel by my bedside."

Harvest time is the setting, and also the mood, as all kinds of over-ripe fruit fall into the lives of the central Carney family. At one point, Tom Kettle, a sort of English idiot savant, sets the tone with a line from Henry Thoreau. "The true harvest of my life is intangible. A little stardust caught. A portion of the rainbow I have clutched."

And if Jerusalem, soaked with country summer sun, marked the flowering of Butterworth's pastoral writing, then this play is his harvest yield. For its co-producer Caro Newling, the Mendes/Butterworth team is theatrical alchemy.

"Jez and Sam have had a great time on this," she said, relaxing into their joint triumph this weekend. "But any attempt to interpret the chemistry of their collaboration will only fall far short of what you see on stage."

The Butterworth story begins however, in grimy south London, where Jez was born, the second youngest of five children to a pair of Irish Catholics. His mother had trained in dentistry and his father was a D-Day veteran lorry driver who had returned to study, becoming a lecturer. Butterworth once explained he had plundered parts of his father's jumpy character in his work, describing him as "delightfully relaxed" in his own home, but adding "the moment someone rang the doorbell, he was anxious". Such a threat to family sanctity is writ large again in The Ferryman.

Butterworth attended a boy's comprehensive once his big family had moved north of the capital, to a neat suburban cul-de-sac in St Albans. The Ferryman 's violent brotherly tussles are testament to the scars of a cramped domestic set-up and Butterworth has since put his yearning for spacious countryside down to these confined years.

His introduction to storytelling came through watching films on TV and an interest in theatre only really sparked when Butterworth made it to Cambridge to read English. He has admitted seeing drama as a way to meet girls.

One of his contemporaries there, the writer and academic Ingrid Wassenaar, appeared in his student play, I Believe in Love, and remembers him as impressively cool, "like a kind of slippery cat", with an "uncanny talent".

"He simply has a steely eye for character and is fascinated by how people fit and don't fit into the social boxes that have been demarcated for them."

Wassenaar also recalls climbing out on the college roof at midnight with him on the eve of graduation. "We inevitably got caught by the porters and ordered down, with threats that we wouldn't be allowed to graduate. I shamefacedly gave my real name. I'll never forget Jez rolling his eyes and sighing at me, as I let the side down."

With one of his two writer brothers, Tom, Butterworth next wrote a play for the Edinburgh fringe based on the Observer's Katharine Whitehorn's book Cooking in a Bedsitter. After university, the brothers set up together in the Wiltshire village that was later to inspire Jerusalem 's Flintlock.

At 24, Butterworth's Soho gangland play, Mojo, signalled his arrival as a creative voice. At the Court, the playwright formed a powerful partnership with director Ian Rickson, who has spoken of the writer's discipline after the success of Mojo. "Jez may have taken some time to process the success of his first play, but, crucially, has gone on to develop an enduring and compelling body of work," he has said, adding that his plays are "often haunted by abandonment and betrayal, and the challenges of real intimacy".

In the seven-year gap before his next play, The Night Heron, he directed two films - Birthday Girl, with Nicole Kidman as a Russian bride, and a screen version of Mojo. He also picked up lucrative work as a Hollywood script doctor, working with director Doug Liman on Mr and Mrs Smith.

"Those who make more commercial movies are really lucky there is somebody like Jez who so perfectly straddles both worlds," Liman has said of Butterworth's creative versatility. "He doesn't really have an equal."

In 2005, the writer and his wife, Gilly, moved to the West Country with their daughters, Gracie and Bel, and a period of feverish creativity began. Butterworth finished Parlour Song, which went on at the Almeida in 2008, and wrote The River, later to star Dominic West and The Ferryman's Laura Donnelly at the Royal Court in 2012. He also worked on Jerusalem, basing its central character, Johnny "Rooster" Byron, on a real-life barfly from Pewsey, Wiltshire, called Micky Lay, later to be immortalised by Mark Rylance.

The success of the plays was overshadowed for a while by the death of Butterworth's sister Jo, who had been registrar at LAMDA. Unable to attend rehearsals for a time, he eventually pushed through, commenting, "You've got to find a way to get through and to celebrate what was."Inspiration for The Ferryman seems to have been drawn from a grim story in actor Donnelly's family past, as well as from Butterworth's Irish heritage and his new life on a five-acre smallholding in Somerset. The play is full of the romance of the farmhouse kitchen and his own, visitors have noted, can be just as littered with baby clothes, books, drink and music as the one now on show on the Royal Court stage.

A fully fledged Belfast sink drama, the play joins the canon of Irish drama, from Seán O'Casey's The Shadow of a Gunman, through Brendan Behan, to the work of Martin McDonagh, Enda Walsh and Conor McPherson.

Until now, though, it is a literary tradition not associated with an English cricket fan. But a cricketing analogy has proved useful to Butterworth in explaining his switches between mass-market cinema and high-end theatre. He aspires, he says, to being like Denis Compton, the cricket star who also excelled at football. Butterworth is about to add major-league television writing to his sporting credentials, with Sky's epic Celtic drama, Britannia, headed for small screens soon.

Executive producer Pippa Harris says that while the backdrops could not be further apart - one set in 80s Northern Ireland, the other in the Roman Britain of AD43 - Butterworth's trademark skills are still on show. "Jez's writing on Britannia demonstrates the same muscular storytelling and dazzling brilliance that he shows in The Ferryman," she says. "Both have a simmering undercurrent of violence, combined with whipsmart, lyrical dialogue."

So perhaps Butterworth, the visionary entertainer, is about to hand Britain a newly minted foundation mythology. It could not come at a better time.

Born Jeremy Butterworth, March 1969, in south London, one of five, to a D-Day veteran father and a former dental student mother. Brothers Tom and John-Henry are also writers, while a third brother, Steve, produces. Their late sister, Jo, was a registrar at Lamda, the drama school.

Best of times Adulation received for Jerusalem in 2009. And this weekend, following glowing reviews for his return to the stage with The Ferryman, after screenwriting for Skyfall and Spectre.

Worst of times The long playwriting pause after his first hit, Mojo, and the death of his sister, Jo, from brain cancer.

What he says "It is an almost mystical experience to begin to write a play, to be inspired to do so. It's coming from somewhere that isn't you. Technique is not enough."

What they say "It blew me away how anyone could come up with these beautifully crafted lines, the rhythm of them. It was just a joy to read, and the easiest lines I've ever had to learn." Mackenzie Crook (Ginger in Jerusalem).

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Jez Butterworth: the visionary fast becoming a theatrical great | Observer profile

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Audiences were on their feet, cheering again, this weekend at the Royal Court. Five days since the opening night of The Ferryman, Paddy Considine and his fellow cast members by now must be accustomed to the hammering applause at the end of Jez Butterworth's new play.

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Jeremy Butterworth (born March 1969) is an English playwright, screenwriter, and film director. He has written screenplays in collaboration with his brothers, John-Henry and Tom.

In March 1969, Butterworth was born in London, England. He has three brothers: older brothers Tom (born 1966) and Steve (born 1968); and younger brother John-Henry (born 1976). He also has a sister, Joanna. He attended Verulam Comprehensive School, St Albans and St John's College, Cambridge. All the brothers have been active in film and theatre: Steve is a producer, while Tom and John-Henry are writers.[citation needed ]

Butterworth's play , which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 1995, won the 1996 Laurence Olivier, Evening Standard, The Writer's Guild, and the George Devine awards, and the Critic's Circle Award. Butterworth also wrote and directed the film adaptation of Mojo (1997). The film featured Harold Pinter.

Butterworth has said that Harold Pinter, 2005 Nobel Literature Laureate, has been a major influence on his work: "I know and admire Harold Pinter enormously. He has a ginormous influence on me. Conversations with him have inspired my work."

Butterworth co-wrote and directed the film Birthday Girl (2001), which was produced by his brother Steve and starred Nicole Kidman.

Butterworth received positive reviews of his play The Night Heron (2002), which premiered in the West End at the Royal Court Theatre. The Guardian reviewer wrote: "Can a play be simultaneously very good and very bad? I believe so." The Winterling also ran at the Royal Court in 2006. The British Theatre Guide wrote: " The Winterling can be a difficult play but contains rich veins of comedy."

In May 2007 Butterworth received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[citation needed ]

His play Parlour Song opened in New York to "rave reviews" at the Atlantic Theatre Company, Off-Broadway in March 2008. The Almeida Theatre presented its European première in March 2009.[citation needed ]

Butterworth's fourth play for the Royal Court Theatre was , which premiered in July 2009 to positive reviews. Described as a "contemporary vision of life in [England's] green and pleasant land", Jerusalem was the second important Butterworth production in London in 2009. The production starred Mark Rylance as Johnny Byron, and featured Mackenzie Crook as Ginger in a supporting role. It was a sell-out at the Royal Court, won the Evening Standard Theatre Award and Critics' Circle Theatre Award for the best play of 2009 and, with the same cast, transferred to the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue in January 2010.[citation needed ]

Jerusalem opened on Broadway in April 2011, with many of the original UK cast. It returned to London later that year, again playing at the Apollo. In January 2014 Jerusalem opened at the San Francisco Playhouse, where it also received rave reviews. Jerusalem was nominated for the 2011 Tony Award, Play. Mark Rylance won the 2011 Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Play.

Jez and John-Henry Butterworth were named recipients of the Writers Guild of America West's 2011 Paul Selvin Award for their screenplay for the film (2010), directed by Doug Liman and starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.[citation needed ]

On 26 October 2012, Butterworth's play The River opened at the Royal Court Theatre, starring Dominic West, Laura Donnelly and Miranda Raison, with an appearance by Gillian Saker. The River had its US premiere on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre in a limited engagement in October 2014, starring Hugh Jackman and directed by Ian Rickson. Reception was positive, with London critics finding the work "lyrical", "beautifully written" and "suffuse[d] with wonder and beauty".

Butterworth's play The Ferryman opened at the Royal Court Theatre in April 2017. Directed by Sam Mendes, it became the fastest selling play in the Royal Court Theatre's history. Set in rural Derry in 1981 and focusing on the events surrounding the deaths of the IRA hunger strikers, it received 15 five-star reviews, including all the major UK papers. The Irish Times said, "Although Butterworth is English, The Ferryman feels like a thoroughly Irish play, not only because there is not a single false note in the dialogue." The Huffington Post said that it was "one of the two or three greatest plays of the decade". But, The Guardian's Sean O'Hagan wrote, "I'm from Northern Ireland and it doesn't ring true", and it was "so close to a cultural stereotype as to be offensive". Two weeks later The Irish Times printed an opinion piece by actor Gerard Lee (of ) entitled "In defence of The Ferryman". He challenged negative comments, calling the play "layered and powerful".

The Ferryman won the 2017 Evening Standard Award for Best Play, the 2018 Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play, the 2018 WhatsOnStage Award for Best New Play, and the 2018 Olivier Award for Best New Play. It has played for over 350 performances at the Gielgud Theatre and transferred to Broadway in October 2018. The play won the 2019 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and Tony Award for Best Play.

Film

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Jeremy Butterworth (born March 1969) is an English playwright, screenwriter, and film director. He has written screenplays in collaboration with his brothers, John-Henry and Tom. In March 1969, Butterworth was born in London, England. He has three brothers: older brothers Tom (born 1966) and Steve (born 1968); and younger brother John-Henry (born 1976).

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A Vision of Englishness

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An analysis and reflection on the play in 2022.

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Parts of a critical essay entitled: 'MEAN FIELDS: NEW AGE TRAVELLERS, THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE AND THATCHERISM by David Christopher

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The Sacred Dragon in the Woods, 2012 (Boll)

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The Sacred Dragon in the Woods, 2012 (Boll)

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An essay exploring how Rooster encapsulates both the scapegoat and the monster in society.

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A selection of student essays exploring 'Jerusalem', covering areas such as the pastoral, side-characters, and visions of England.

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Definition of pastoral literature.

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Pastoral literature -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

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The Forest: Butterworth's Setting for 'Jerusalem' (Peel)

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The Forest: Butterworth's Setting for 'Jerusalem' (Peel)

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An essay taken from Johnathan Peel's excellent blog, examining the significance of the setting.

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Short review.

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Byron's Masculinity/Portrayal of Gender in 'Jerusalem' (Moore/De Angelis/Savannah)

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Byron's Masculinity/Portrayal of Gender in 'Jerusalem' (Moore/De Angelis/Savannah)

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A selection of short extracts examining Rooster's masculinity, plus the troubling portrayal of female characters.

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A short essay exploring 'Jerusalem'. Winner of the Connell Guides Essay Prize 2015

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A compilation of various quotations from critics.

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Jez Butterworth and Mark Rylance discuss the play 'Jerusalem'.

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Theater Talk: "Jerusalem" Playwright Jez Butterworth and Tony-winning Best Actor, Mark Rylance

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Tony nominees, playwright Jez Butterworth and actor Mark Rylance, discuss JERUSALEM, Butterworth's new play in which Rylance plays one of the most outrageous characters ever to cross a Broadway stage. The work also explores the decline of human sensibilities in England's post-industrial age. Theater Talk is a series devoted to the world of the stage.

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The character of the Rogue in English Literature.

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Here Mark Rylance talks about his early life, and his role as Rooster Byron.

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Actor Mark Rylance talks with John Lahr  - Conversations - The New Yorker

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The actor Mark Rylance talks with John Lahr about the challenges of performing Rooster in Jez Butterworth's "Jerusalem" and explains how he calms down after performances. Still haven't subscribed to The New Yorker on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/newyorkeryoutubesub CONNECT WITH THE NEW YORKER Web: http://www.newyorker.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/NewYorker Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/newyorker Google+: http://plus.google.com/+newyorker Instagram: http://instagram.com/newyorkermag Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/thenewyorker Tumblr: http://newyorker.tumblr.com The Scene: http://thescene.com/thenewyorker Want even more?

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The use of (explicit) Language in 'Jerusalem

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The use of (explicit) Language in 'Jerusalem

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An analysis of the significance of the 'beat' (long pause) in 'Jerusalem'.

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Mark Rylance & Mackenzie Crook on Andrew Marr

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Mark Rylance talking about "Jerusalem", on Newsnight, 29/09/11

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WhatsOnStage Youtube Review of 'Jerusalem'

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WhatsOnStage Youtube Review of 'Jerusalem'

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Review by Alexander Wood.

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Prima Facie with Jodie Comer, Jerusalem reviews | 2022 in the West End

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Jez Butterworth answers questions about the play 'Jerusalem'

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Jez Butterworth answers questions about the play 'Jerusalem'

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An interview with J. Butterworth by the Tortoise Youtube channel.

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The story behind the best British play ever: a ThinkIn with Jez Butterworth

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The Guardian review of the 2022 re-run.

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On Jez Butterworth’s ‘Jerusalem’ & Our Fallacy of Albion

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On Jez Butterworth’s ‘Jerusalem’ & Our Fallacy of Albion

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Finding Blake creator and filmmaker James Murray-White shares his recent experience of Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem — a play addressing big themes and offering a Blakean vision and comment on modern Britain.

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William Blake poet artist visionary radical

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On Jez Butterworth’s ‘Jerusalem’ & Our Fallacy of Albion - William Blake poet artist visionary radical

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James Murray-White shares his recent experience of Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem: a Blakean vision and comment on modern Britain.

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An article looking at the continued persecution of ravers and others who lived 'alternative' lifestyles through the 80s, 90s and 2000s.

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Gypsies and Travellers - The Forgotten Minority

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Gypsies and Travellers - The Forgotten Minority

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An academic article looking at the persecution of travellers and gypsies in the UK.

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Looking at a seminal 1980s battle between the authorities and those who lived an alternative lifestyle (squatters/travellers).

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The Legacy of the Newbury Bypass Protests

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The Legacy of the Newbury Bypass Protests

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An article examining the conflict between environmental protesters/squatters and the authorities in the 90s.

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A PHd thesis: In this work my aim has been to consider the history and treatment of the new Travellers in the media and by the agents of social control from a perspective within the sociology of deviance. Most of the research for this study was conducted between 1996 and 1998, in a mix of interviews with Travellers and informants of all kinds, documentary research and some participant observation at sites and festivals in the south-west and north of England.

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The Tensions of Modern Britain in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem

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The Tensions of Modern Britain in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem

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An interview and analysis of Butterworth's life and plays (including) - very good for AO3.

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Jez Butterworth’s True Calling _ The New Yorker

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Paul Mason's analysis of 'Jerusalem' from a political perspective.

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A blog examining the play. whilst also looking at some of the cultural allusions made in the play.

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A blog looking at the influence of 'Romanticism' on 'Jerusalem'.

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An academic essay looking at the influence of William Blake's ideas on 'Jerusalem'.

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[Journal of Contemporary Drama in English] The Blakean Imagination and the Land in Jez Butterworths Jerusalem

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An online theatre review of the 2022 revival.

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A review of the 'Jerusalem' revival, 2022.