By JERRY TALLMER
It would be nice to say that Jez Butterworth looks like a pirate and writes like an angel, except that the angel has to be Mephistopheles, his pink cherubic face surrounded top, bottom, and all sides by masses of coal-black hair.
Butterworth’s last entry at the Atlantic Theater on West 20th Street was “Mojo,” in which a handful of London lowlifes shot slambang dialogue at one another so rapidly and so ferociously as to make one’s own hair curl, whatever its color. One of the things that emerged bit by bit, so to speak, is that a fearsome boss gangster named Ezra was now actually residing in two pieces — the top half of him and the bottom half of him — in two trash bins at the back door of the Soho jazz club in which the play was set.
Now Jez is back in town with “The Night Heron,” a very different drama, also at the Atlantic, in which the dialogue is not quite so staccato but no less vaguely ominous.
Its principals are a man named Wattmore and another man named Griffin, who live together in a smashed-up cabin in the Cambridgeshire fens, or bogs, subsisting off trapped rabbits and bad news. Their set up is disarranged by an unexpected “tenant” — a large, vigorous, opinionated woman named Bolla, who has “been away,” i.e., in prison, where her companion in solitary was a mouse. Rounding out this disjointed ensemble are several numb-nut provincials who may or may not have good reason to believe the ugly molestation hints about Griffin, or perhaps it’s Wattmore, that flow like beer in the local pubs and keep appearing on the front page of the local weekly, The Bugle.
“Yeah, they’re different,” Jez Butterworth cheerfully said of these two plays of his. It was an hour before rehearsals of “The Night Heron,” and Butterworth was catching his breath at a rear table in Le Gamin, an Atlantic hangout on Ninth Avenue.
Butterworth has clear and freely acknowledged debts for tone of voice and everydayness of menace to Harold Pinter; also, in the case of “Mojo,” our blackbearded playwright said, to three films made before he was born: Lindsay Anderson’s “Every Day Except Christmas” (1957), Karel Reisz’s “We Are the Lambeth Boys” (1958), and, especially, Wolf Mankowitz’s “Expresso Bongo” (1960), a wonderful movie with Laurence Harvey as a two-bit Brit Sammy Glick clawing his way up through the underside of swinging London by latching on to a potential star in drummer Cliff Richard.
Two mod mobsters who terrified and fascinated all London in the 1960s were the Kray brothers, well-dressed brutal twins and killers. “I think the Krays were put in jail the year I was born,” said Butterworth, who was in fact born March 4, 1969, in Guy’s Hospital on the south side of the Thames.
“There weren’t any thugs in any of those movies,” he said, “though there were in ‘The Small World of Sammy Lee’ ” — another of the genre, starring Anthony Newley.
“None of the characters on stage in ‘Mojo’ was a gangster; they just talked about such things. Mostly I made it up,” said Butterworth. “I just imagined it. In fact there was no actual menace on stage, except for Baby [dead Ezra’s hipster son], and he was just a lost soul.
“I never saw [the characters on stage] that way, as gangsters. I just saw it as a bunch of children pretending to be something else.”
Would that not pertain as well to Wattmore and Griffin in “The Night Heron”?
“I think so. I don’t know why I write that kind of characters who respond on a very basic level to each other. I don’t mean violent. I guess I mean unsynthesized, and childish.”
Jeremy Butterworth — “I’ve been called Jez since before I can remember” — is the middle one of the five children of John Butterworth and Shena Malone Butterworth, “a good Irish girl.”
There’s Tom, the oldest, with whom Jez wrote the Nicole Kidman movie “Birthday Girl”; there’s Steve, who produced “Birthday Girl”; there’s Jez; there’s John Henry (“I’ve written three films with him”), and there’s Joanna, an admissions registrar at LAMDA, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.
“My dad, he died four years ago, was in the Navy on a landing craft at Omaha Beach on D-Day. My mother’s 19 years younger than my dad.
“After the war he was a truck driver until 1960, when a trade-union scholarship took him to Ruskin College, Oxford — that’s right, named for John Ruskin. This play is dedicated to my dad, and lots of the characters in it are named after his childhood friends.
“He taught us to take education seriously, and I took it seriously enough to get into Cambridge [University], then I didn’t take it seriously at all.” Cambridge had been preceded by what the British call comprehensive [i.e., public] school — “the Verulam School, we all went there, in St. Albans, an old Roman town 20 miles due north of Central London.”
Jez was three years at Cambridge — three very happy years, crowned with a 1991 degree in English lit.
“A fantastic time. I started writing as soon as I got there. The first thing was a play called ‘Cooking in a Bedsitter,’ written from a cook book. It was just what you hoped three years would be like. Interestingly, there’s no theater course as such at Cambridge, but I spent all my time, 80 hours a week, doing theater. Never studied. Went to one lecture in three years.”
Going to Cambridge is how Butterworth knows the landscape in which “The Night Heron” takes place: the fens of Cambrideshire. “Reclaimed marshes, extremely flat and barren.”
What was the point of departure of “The Night Heron”? In his head, that is.
“That’s the hardest question: Why you start off with the ideas you do. It perplexes me to this day,” Butterworth said. “There was no moment with this when any decisions were made — or the decisions that were made were made in a miasma. And when the miasma passes,” he said, as cheerfully as before, “you hope you have a play.
“It’s as close to being pregnant as you can get,” said Jez Butterworth. “You learn the feeling when you walk. The end result?” — he spread his hands wide — “there’s an extremely mysterious thing going on because only certain parts of it I can claim.”
He can, however, claim a wife, film editor Gilly Richardson, and it was with her and younger brother John Henry that he was passing through Times Square two years ago when they saw an electric sign: “NASDAQ PRAYS FOR PEOPLE IN WORLD TRADE CENTER,” and didn’t know what it meant until their taxi reached Ninth Avenue at Bleecker Street. Then they knew: it was right in front of them.
“On the second anniversary, my wife and I and John Henry were all here again.” This time, not with “Mojo” but with “The Night Heron,” directed, as before, by Neil Pepe. It’s still people talking mysteriously, dangerously — like naughty children pretending to be something they’re not.
