Jerusalem *****

Royal Court

I don’t know where to start with Jerusalem.

The first place has to be Mark Rylance. This is his play and he blows your socks off. He is Rooster Byron, a bloke who live in a trailer in the woods of Flintoff, drinking and smoking, where all the local kids and assorted people with nothing better to do go and hang around and drink, smoke, shag and take drugs. He’s charismatic, a storyteller, an indomitable spirit.

His performance is really something special, and I will be stunned if he doesn’t win, or at least get nominations for, best actor awards.

The play is an epic three hours and split into three parts. It takes place on the day of the village fair and the council are coming to evict Rooster.

The first part is basically a lot of these people sitting round talking outside the trailer.

The ensemble cast does a very competent job: Mackenzie Crook as Ginger, who’s a bit wet and applies basic logic that deflates the most inflated of Rooster’s tales; Tom Brooke as the sweet and skinny Lee Piper, who is going off to Australia and is scared to be leaving Flintoff; the overweight kid who is proud not to leave Flintoff and works at an abattoir killing 200 cows a day; Lee points out that he’ll kill 2 million cows by the end of it.

It’s nothing special and veers slightly on being dull; the banter is funny enough but not gripping and the characters are engaging but a little two dimensional.

But the dullness of the first part proves necessary; it sets the scene, the ordinariness of it, the safeness where these people congregate despite the lack of health and safety, the badger shit, the coke on the table. And it provides a huge contrast to what happens next.

The second part starts to build the tension. A teenage girl of 15 called Phedre has gone missing; her stepfather comes to Rooster calling him a gypo and a maggot and says he has something to do with it.

Rooster says that her stepfather has been interfering with her. By now, Rooster’s character is emerging more strongly. This is a man who rode daredevil over 13 buses, broke his bones, technically died, and then got up for a pint.

As well as a fighter, he is a great story teller. One story is a particularly tall tale. He met a giant outside a pub who told him that he built Stonehenge. The giant’s earring drops to the ground, and is a full-size drum. Rooster says that if he hits the drum, it will summon the giants.

Everybody greets the story with disbelief and the ever-logical Ginger says that BBC Points West woud have covered the story were it true. Even so, the power of Rooster’s story-telling makes them terririfed to bang on the drum.

But it’s in the third part – after the relaxed realism of the first part and the building tension of the second part – where Rylance comes into his own.

You feel the impending tragedy. Eveything that is unique, different, wild, un PC, sex at 12, coke on the table, is OK: it’s the rich variety of life, the dark undercurrents that throb and keep the world alive, and it’s in danger of being whitewashed out by the council and the new estate and the pub brewaries who enforce codes of conduct.

One piece of acting is astonishing. When Phedre tries to get him to his feet to dance, there is a silent struggle between his unspoken commitment to providing a haven and his attraction and compulsion to get close to the girl. He sits there with his mind willing his body back and sadness as his body is pulled forward; and all wihtout barely moving a muscle.

As the play builds to its climax, Rooster is attacked. All the way through he is barrel chested ready to fight and yet perfectly still. Now, he is broken and ostensibly beaten, and you think there is no chance he will survive. And this is when it really kicks in. He is elemental, and reminded me of Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood or Gangs of New York.

Everything that you thought was real changes. The ending is unbelievable and yet completely and utterly convincing, with its paganism and power. I have never left a show on such an adreneline high.

There was an ovation, and stange yelps from the audience. Several curtain calls and Rylance jumping up and down with some sort of raw energy. I left the building in a trance. Then went back realising I was in need of beer. We completely forgot about the cast talk at the end until a second wave of people emerged half an hour later.

It is a powerful lesson for a play such as Phedre with Helen Mirren at the National, which was high intensity from the very start. Take your time and build it up, it’s way more effective.

The play is good, but not overwhelmingly so. It’s also a weakness of the play that Rooster is so charismatic and powerful. It means that the other characters don’t get a look in; they suffer the fate of being ordinary. But Jerusalem is all about Rooster Byron, and more specifically Rylance.

See it, you really should.

Jerusalem transfers to the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue from 28 January 2010