Dear Olivier Voter

Revivals don’t always have to reinvent a play to reveal it anew.

We talk a lot about risk in theatre – and, when we do, we usually mean daring to create something uncertain and new. That’s vital, of course. It keeps our art form and our industry alive. We’d be lost without new work, new voices, new shows.

But sometimes it takes just as much courage to return to our successes - maybe even more.

No play in living memory has been heralded by critics, art historians, teachers and audiences like Jez Butterworth’s bacchanalian exploration of Englishness - “the greatest play of the 21st century,” ran those first reviews.

Fourteen years ago, Jerusalem passed into theatre lore. Ian Rickson’s production implanted itself into the memories of those that saw it: the ferocious drumbeat of Mark Rylance's mighty and astonishing Johnny "Rooster" Byron, summoning up the giants; the gleaming Winnebago beneath ULTZ’s real, rustling trees; the safari hat Mackenzie Crook’s tripping Ginger thought himself stuck in for good. Details have been poured over again and again, from live tortoises and chickens to the smell of petrol wafting through the stalls.

In April 2020 - one month into lockdown - Jez, Mark, Ian and I announced that Jerusalem would return to the West End once theatres were able to reopen. That we'd REVIVE Jerusalem and in so doing help REVIVE our hope and our theatres.

So...almost exactly a decade after its ‘final’ performance, Jerusalem returned to the West End, to our spiritual home at the Apollo.

It was a lot to live up to, and it would have been easier for all those artists not to have tried; easier to rest on old laurels, to let sleeping giants lie. But these are extraordinary and fearless artists, theatre-makers to their core.

But it was revelatory – the same but different. As ribald, as wild, as vicious as ever but sadder somehow, and, as Sandy Denny’s ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ floated off vinyl, showing its age in the most beautiful way. Jez's play spoke to a post-Brexit Britain, divided and lost, chasing its shadows and repeating its myths, in a way no one could have imagined all those years ago. And it was still a great, great night out: proof of everything theatre can be and do.

It sold out immediately. Audiences flocked to experience something that was beyond theatre. And the critics unanimously agreed it was better than ever, firmly cementing the play as a BRITISH timeless classic.

It has been one of the privileges of my working life to produce Jerusalem in the West End, at the beautiful Apollo, not once, not twice, but three times, and I would implore you to do this singular piece of theatre the honour of giving it your vote this time around so it can finally have the Olivier statue it so deserves.

Thank you,