This interview took place in October 2011, on the eve of the West End reopening of Jerusalem, following the play’s award-winning Broadway run. Here Butterworth discusses the origins of the plays that appear in Mojo and Other Plays, the new volume of his works just published by TCG Books.

NICK HERN: Can we start when you’re 25, which is when you wrote Mojo? How did that come about?

JEZ BUTTERWORTH: I left London and moved to Pewsey in Wiltshire, which ended up being the fictional model for Flintock in Jerusalem. It was a dreamlike experience: I left London with the unrealistic dream of writing a play which spoke to people. And that’s kind of what happened.

It was very odd—to spend this period of utter penury through the winter out in the countryside, writing every day and every night, no television, no car, only a bicycle…

But Mojo is a very urban play. Where did that come from?

The actual initial impetus for the play was a conversation I had with Malcolm McLaren. He was talking about Soho and the wonderful collision between early rock-and-roll and gangland violence. It wasn’t something I knew anything about, but there was something about the collision between these two things that sparked something. Who knows where plays come from, but in this case it came from Malcolm.

What I didn’t want it to be was about gangsters. I wanted it to be about people who think they are—or who possibly know—gangsters, but aren’t. Because they’re a bunch of children, everyone in the play—it’s like a school playground game, really. Sweets and Potts aren’t gangsters. Skinny’s not a gangster. Nobody in it is, really. Baby’s just a lost soul…. It was always taken as a gangland play, but it’s not at all.

So you sent it to the Royal Court?

My agent at the time, Nick Marston, sent the play to the Bush, and Dominic Dromgoole [then artistic director of the Bush] mentioned it by mistake in conversation with Stephen Daldry [then artistic director of the Royal Court], and Stephen Daldry just poached it.

So the play was virtually fast-tracked onto the stage?

I finished the play in January. In February I was sitting in an office at the Royal Court with Stephen and Ian Rickson.

He’d been brought in to direct it?

Ian wanted to do it. I went through a process of rewriting it for a week and then they decided they were going to stick it on the main stage. I moved back to London on May 1, on May 2 I won the George Devine Award, and we started rehearsing a month later. And a month after that it was a sell-out.

No wonder in the photo of you outside the Royal Court at that period, you’re looking a bit…

…shell-shocked.

Exactly: shell-shocked!

And then me and the Royal Court kind of parted company. I directed a film of Mojo the next year. It was a good long while before I set foot back in the Royal Court.

And you were writing screenplays during this absence from the theatre?

Yes, lots of screenplays—lots of which didn’t get made, lots of which were working on other people’s things. I realized by the time I was 33, 34, that I’d taken a wrong turning. Some dreadful cocktail of fear and being paid just enough money meant that I had completely wheel-clamped my creative desire to go in any direction that was going to satisfy me. And I had to own up to that. So it was around that point that I moved back to the countryside.

Was there a Road to Damascus moment?

There was a moment in 2003–04 when the music I was trying to listen to didn’t sound as good: troubling rather than nourishing. I’d started lying to myself about something to do with my nature and what I want, and I’ve got to go and find it out. And so the next year or so was a fairly fearless swan-dive into a place where I felt I could write a line that was true and resonated with my own heart rather than being the right length and suiting someone else’s needs.

I do understand that: You were psychoanalyzing yourself, in a sense…

On a lot of long walks by rivers with a dog we’d just bought, where I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my work. I realized I was properly marooned and needed to do something about it. The Winterling was the first play I wrote out in Devon, where I was living. It’s pretty much a cross-section of what was going on with me at the time. I’d started to keep, slaughter and butcher animals. And that play is very much a visceral, animal-like experience. Really it’s about the question—it strikes me now—as to whether there is any mercy in the world. Of course there is: We’re the only ones that have it. But it’s a question of where it gets exercised in the course of that play. There’s an act of mercy at the end of that play, which is the first thing that happens in it that a bear wouldn’t be capable of doing.

You wrote it at top speed because of this gap that had opened up in the program for the Royal Court’s 50th anniversary year?

I sat down to write one play and another one came out. I was left alone in the cottage that we lived in and it was the night that Harold Pinter did his Nobel Prize speech, called “Art, Truth and Politics.” And I watched it. I knew Harold—I’d directed him in the film of Mojo—but I hadn’t seen him for ages. And in the first part of that speech, he tells you how to write a play—in the first 10 minutes: He just takes you through it. It was like being reminded how to write a play. You’ll remember Harold was extremely ill, too ill to go and collect the award—it was like he was going to die any day. So I decided to sit down and write using entirely his technique. And try to speak like him. The Winterling sounds a lot like Harold Pinter. Everybody said that—except Harold. I wish to God I’d dedicated the play to him, because then it would have been obvious what it was I was up to: It was really an exercise in homage and also a wish to try to get close to him.

Close to him as a person or…?

Close to him as a creative force. To try to stand in his shoes. I saw the play again the other day for the first time and I was surprised by how much I liked it. I expected to find that it was a stuffed bird, but it’s not at all. It flies. I don’t give a fuck how much it sounds like Harold; it’s not easy to sound like Harold. Everybody does it: There’s a point where you sing in someone else’s voice before you sing in your own. There’s this thing that critics get up to here where it’s almost as if they’re trying to work out who you copied your homework off. Voice is the hardest thing to grasp. But the critics’ attitude to writers is: “Let’s stamp the shit out of them when they’re on a journey to finding their voice.” Were I a different person, I could have been destroyed by the response to that play.

You said you were too busy to see the play more than once. That was because your film career was carrying on in tandem? Did you deliberately wind down your film commitments?

I did, yes. Around 2007 I started to change my ideas about what I wanted to use the theatre for. It wasn’t just a mysterious process that you threw yourself at in a short space of time. I suddenly realized that it was of foremost importance to me that I’d always written for actors, not audiences. I love the idea that an
actor gets to spend a month—or two if you’re lucky—with your work, your words, and thinks about it in a way that an audience isn’t privileged to. It becomes a part of the actor’s life. And I realized the whole process is about evoking anxieties that we share, anxieties that you can bring to light and deal with in the theatre. It hit me like a bolt of lightning: That’s what it’s for; this is a church. If I get this right, and I try hard enough, and I’m brave enough about it, I’m going to be able to access something which is going to be of importance to the actors first of all, and then to the audience.

With Parlour Song and then Jerusalem appearing on stage here in the U.K. in the same year, it seemed that some floodgate had been opened. What happened? Did you write them in parallel? Is the one related to the other?

One takes place in a wood and the other takes place in a new estate that’s been built on the site of a wood. Ned in Parlour Song says: “There’s been a wood; it was here for a thousand years. Now it’s gone: we’re here.” And then in Jerusalem there’s the idea that the wood is going to be erased and replaced by housing estates. And though they’re set in different parts of England, those two ideas speak to each other. Rooster Byron in Jerusalem and Ned in Parlour Song couldn’t be more opposite. One is utterly defiant, courageous and free-spirited, the other is occluded, scared, closed, neurotic and shutting everything out—throughout. Albeit they’re both in states of delusion and denial, they’re opposite ends of the scale.

So did they come together in your mind?

Not consciously, but then at this point very little is conscious in terms of what it is I’m trying to do. I’ve found a way of disengaging consciously altogether from the process and of following a path, almost like following a trail of breadcrumbs through a wood, of goose bump experiences. I’m just using it as a compass: If the next bit creates goose bumps in some way, I’ll go there and I don’t ask why.

Harold Pinter used to talk about writing down snatches of dialogue or even just images which then went nowhere. Do you have false starts, or are you able to follow your compass accurately?

Jerusalem was a false start in as much as I wrote a first draft in 2004 and wholly disliked the first stab. The play was obviously big in scope, and I simply was unable to corral its effects into any kind of satisfying whole. Whether this was because, on a basic level, I hadn’t composed for that many instruments before, or whether it was because I was afraid to really say what the play wanted to say, I will never know. But I returned to it in the spring of 2009, by which time, as I’ve described, my whole approach to my work had fundamentally changed. And it just came.

Apart from that, I don’t have many half-written things. If I sit down to do it, I’ll do it. I tend to end up with very few notes, usually a small amount that I will have lost along the way. It’s almost like a performance, I suppose, where you sit down and set yourself an unfeasible time limit, usually dictated by a deadline, so it’s got to happen. It’s that feel of an actor walking on stage. What a neurologist might call “performance arousal” occurs, where your brain sets itself up along different lines under pressure.

In 2007 I became friends with Harold Pinter and had lots of lunches with him and conversations with him about writing. In the two years before he died I saw him a lot and went to visit him. The conversations that we would have made it clear to me what it was I wanted to do professionally for the rest of my life, if I can. The things that Harold was saying were so extraordinarily profound and so meaningful to me that there was to be no fear from now on. There was going to be no place for that at all. In July 2007 he said something to me that was absolutely the ignition and spur to my decision to dedicate myself to playwriting.

Can you put it into words?

I’m never going to tell anyone.

That was 2007.

After The Winterling, before Parlour Song and Jerusalem.

Did Parlour Song start with a specific image? Did you, for instance, turn into a particular housing estate and think, “God, how deadly”?

I grew up on a new-build estate. We moved in a good five years after the houses were built on green-belt land on the edge of the countryside. Birthday Girl [a film written and directed by Butterworth, starring Nicole Kidman, in 2001] deals with that as well: He’s got suburbs out the front and wilderness out the back. I knew that world. We grew up in a house where the house next door was a mirror image.

I have the impression that the prerehearsal draft of Jerusalem that I read was a good deal longer than what appeared on stage. Do you get it all down and then look at what you’ve got?

I was producing a film in New York at the time by day, Fair Game, and writing Jerusalem by night. There’s an idea that this play took eight years to write, but actually it took about nine weeks over eight years: three weeks, four weeks and two weeks. The last bit was in New York, literally moonlighting, trying to get it finished at the very last minute. So we went into rehearsal with it not completed, which is, by the way, my dream state to enter any rehearsal.

Tell me, finally, about Leavings and The Naked Eye, the two short plays in the book.

I’ve had a 15-year affair going on with the Atlantic Theater in New York. I did Mojo there in 1997, which was after Ian directed it at Steppenwolf. I met Neil Pepe, who’s been the Atlantic’s artistic director for a good 20 years, and we just hit it off. They’ve put on three of my plays and two shorts. And again, they will call up and say, “We’ve got the 20th anniversary coming up, can you write a one-act?” So I’ll bang something out. Those sort of calls to arms have always sparked me off. Parlour Song, for instance, started at the Atlantic, because they had a slot. The two one-acts were both essentially occasional pieces for different events.

There was no theme suggested to you?

None whatsoever, no. The last one, The Naked Eye, came about because I’d met Zosia Mamet, who’s David Mamet’s daughter and a wonderful actor, and I wanted to write something specifically for her. That was as far as it went in terms of a theme.

And Leavings, the one about the dog, obviously has links to The Winterling.

The Winterling was written incredibly quickly. I literally put that down and started writing Leavings. And oddly enough it starts exactly the same way. My neighbor had come round in floods of tears: Her husband had left a brace of duck which he’d forgotten about on the seat of their Land Rover. She’d opened the door and they’d leapt out—one of them was dead and the other wasn’t. They were a mating pair, so one was tied to the dead partner. And it just struck me…. Anyone who’s struggling with any kind of grief with the death of someone…. So a lot of that was just the putting together of things that had happened to me immediately that week. It was an odd state to be in—very creative.

Nick Hern is a well-known editor and publisher of dramatic literature in the U.K. He founded Nick Hern Books in 1988 after many years with Methuen Books in London.