These are busy times for Dua Lipa. The British-Kosovan-Albanian is planning a wedding this summer, is the new face of Nespresso (joining George Clooney), recently returned from safari in South Africa with her fiancé, the actor Callum Turner (the bookies’ favourite to be the next James Bond), and in October will be curating the London Literature Festival, which forms part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary celebrations.
Yet, despite so much busyness, Lipa has been keeping up with her monthly reading commitments for the Service95 Book Club with Dua Lipa podcast. Just announced for this month is So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan, displaying Lipa’s refined literary taste. Her latest guest on the show was Jez Butterworth, who talked about his blazing, multi-award-winning 2009 play Jerusalem. “Perhaps the most iconic play of the 21st century,” Lipa posits.
This was a particularly personal pick: she has “been obsessed” with Butterworth’s contemporary play since she studied it as a GCSE text at Parliament Hill school in north London in 2011, soon after its initial hit runs at the Royal Court, then in the West End. But she didn’t manage to see it until the play, set in rural Wiltshire on St George’s Day, was revived in 2022. Luckily, Mark Rylance reprised his epic, incandescent central role as the shamanistic, mercurial, caravan-dwelling Johnny “Rooster” Byron — facing but resisting eviction — opposite Mackenzie Crook as the put-upon Ginger.
Actually, there has been some excited chatter about Jerusalem in my household lately because it is one of my elder son’s A-level texts. It is an inspired choice for sixth-formers since so many of its supporting characters are restless teenagers seeking kicks in the woods. To her interview with Butterworth Lipa brought a fan’s untutored keenness that some more gatekeeping literary types might deem a little inane but I found endearing. The amiable Butterworth clearly did too, answering Lipa’s open-hearted questions with enthusiasm.
There is a spine-tingling moment when he speaks with awe of Rylance’s technical tool kit as an actor: “Mark could tell whether someone was going to cough in three seconds, 80 yards away in the upper circle, and just reshape what he was about to do. That’s somewhere between craft and magic, to be that attuned to 1,000 people … He would never be coughed over.”
Butterworth grew up in Hertfordshire, near Europe’s biggest Travellers community, and is insightful about the circumstances of and his encounters with local characters who swam in his imagination until landing in this play. He is also insightful about how his ideas gestate over years — about 15 years in the case of Jerusalem. “And that’s quick for me. I’ve got an idea for a play that I’m going to attempt later on this year because I feel it coming that I’ve had since 1993.”
While theatre is his mainstay, he is more continually inspired by music, and is one of the screenwriters of Sam Mendes’s forthcoming Beatles biopics. Listener extras include him reading one of his Lord of Misrule Rooster’s key soliloquies.
It was intriguing to hear Butterworth speak of the fierce sense of place in Jerusalem and how influenced he is by song, because last week I also enjoyed new episodes of Origin Stories, a podcast exclusive to Apple Music and Apple Podcasts, which takes emerging acts back to where it all began and to someone who believed in them. For the rapper Aitch that is Manchester’s Wellington Mill where, aged 17, he would scrape together £20 to buy an hour’s recording time, before the producer WhyJay started collaborating with him. The singer Mahalia took the series back to her middle school in Leicester and her motivational music teacher, Mr Hill.
In the most exhilarating but potentially confronting episode, the Irish-language hip-hop trio Kneecap took Matt Wilkinson to west Belfast and the Hawthorn Bar (An Teach Beag) to meet Ciarán Mac Giolla Bhéin, president of Conradh na Gaeilge, a forum for promoting the Irish language.
Kneecap came up through Irish-language youth work initiatives and, whatever you think of the controversial band, it is undeniably interesting to hear of how, in the north, the Irish-language revival has been driven at an urban, working-class and political level (language revival is usually middle-class), and of how Kneecap have invented a new urban lexicon.
Whether you deem them mostly mischievous or actually dangerous (perhaps worth mentioning here that I had a sibling deployed to Belfast at the time of the Northern Irish peace agreement), these three are fascinating about the influence of their “mammies” cleaning to rebel songs, and scurrilously funny about how nationalist politicians initially shared their songs enthusiastically before horrified press officers told them about the drugs content.
Kneecap strike me as characters quite akin to Butterworth’s Rooster.
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