Jez Butterworth<\/a>, who talked about his blazing, multi-award-winning 2009 play Jerusalem. \u201cPerhaps the most iconic play of the 21st century,\u201d Lipa posits.\u00a0<\/p>\nThis was a particularly personal pick: she has \u201cbeen obsessed\u201d with Butterworth\u2019s 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\u2019t manage to see it until the play, set in rural Wiltshire on St George\u2019s Day, was revived in 2022. Luckily, Mark Rylance reprised his epic, incandescent central role as the shamanistic, mercurial, caravan-dwelling Johnny \u201cRooster\u201d Byron \u2014 facing but resisting eviction \u2014 opposite Mackenzie Crook as the put-upon Ginger.<\/p>\n
Actually, there has been some excited chatter about Jerusalem in my household lately because it is one of my elder son\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s open-hearted questions with enthusiasm. <\/p>\n
There is a spine-tingling moment when he speaks with awe of Rylance\u2019s technical tool kit as an actor: \u201cMark 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\u2019s somewhere between craft and magic, to be that attuned to 1,000 people \u2026 He would never be coughed over.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Butterworth grew up in Hertfordshire, near Europe\u2019s 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 \u2014 about 15 years in the case of Jerusalem. \u201cAnd that\u2019s quick for me. I\u2019ve got an idea for a play that I\u2019m going to attempt later on this year because I feel it coming that I\u2019ve had since 1993.\u201d <\/p>\n
While theatre is his mainstay, he is more continually inspired by music, and is one of the screenwriters of Sam Mendes\u2019s forthcoming Beatles biopics. Listener extras include him reading one of his Lord of Misrule Rooster\u2019s key soliloquies.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Wellington Mill where, aged 17, he would scrape together \u00a320 to buy an hour\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
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 Ciar\u00e1n Mac Giolla Bh\u00e9in, president of Conradh na Gaeilge, a forum for promoting the Irish language.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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 \u201cmammies\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
Kneecap strike me as characters quite akin to Butterworth\u2019s Rooster.<\/p>\n
Which podcasts or radio shows have you recently listened to? Let us know in the comments below<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"These are busy times for Dua Lipa. The British-Kosovan-Albanian is planning a wedding this summer, is the new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423238,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":["post-423237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}