Good manners, courtesy – when he's sober. "He has a side that's quite charming and very, very well mannered. "He has two sides, Micky Lay," said Rylance. Rylance told American critics he got his voice and the rhythm of Rooster's speech from Lay, as well as a concern for the disaffected young people around him. "I used to imitate them years ago, but there are not as many as there used to be." Today he makes do with watching Springwatch on television. I have studied them all my life," he said. "I love wildlife and I am into watching birds. "Trees make oxygen and we are between two forests here."Īside from horse racing, Lay also has a love of the natural creatures around him. "I worked out a while ago that Wiltshire air is the purest," he said. But for Lay, Pewsey's fortuitous location is simply a matter of breathing clean air. Pewsey sits close to Salisbury Plain, between Stonehenge and Wootton Bassett, two place names that together have the power to summon up an idea of what England used to mean and what it means now. But the way I look at it, you have got to be a millionaire nowadays to be an alcoholic." His mother, Daisy, cleaned locally and, he says, liked a bitter lemon and gin. They build one big Co-op store and it kills all the other stores. Lay put it more succinctly: "I just think you should enjoy life." But he does share Rooster's nostalgia. "School is a lie, prison a waste of time and women are wondrous," he advises at one point. "I may not have been around to witness Olivier or Gielgud or Richardson tread the boards, but I've seen Rylance, and that's good enough for me."īutterworth has styled Rooster as a kind of country philosopher. "It's the best, most thrilling performance that I have ever seen on a stage, one destined to go down in legend," wrote Adam Green in Vogue. Theatre critics in America have echoed British delight in the production, which began at the Royal Court in London in 2009. "I told him to fuck off," remembered Lay, "but then he came back next week with a bottle of whisky."Īs the central character in a valedictory pastoral tale, the charismatic Rooster has gained international status as a contemporary Falstaff, armed with the country magic of Pan, or a mythical Green Man. Lay, who was by then back in a house in the village, refused to let Rylance in. But the first of three visits did not go well. Later, when the playwright was working on the script in London with Rylance, Butterworth and the director, Ian Rickson, sent the actor down to Pewsey to meet the original Byron in the flesh. In the play Rooster lives in a caravan in the woods, surrounded by what he calls a "band of educationally subnormal outcasts". And my first job will be to knock that bloody wall down," he said.ĭuring the period when Butterworth stayed in Pewsey, Lay was living, after a divorce, in a caravan amid the trees, "shooting rabbits on the railway tracks". "I am going to get another one, actually. Lay, who has been convicted for possession of drugs, used to run his own JCB excavator and work locally. "It is all that dancing around on stage with just a vest on." "You must be coming down with a chill," joked Kevin Arthur, another local in the bar. Proudly displaying other cuts and abrasions, Lay revealed a large tattoo of a ship on his arm and admitted to feeling delicate. It is the kind of behaviour that has resulted in bans, or at least two-pint curfews, at several of Pewsey's pubs. Now 71, the former builder boasts that he once drank 43 pints of Guinness in an afternoon. But I should have knocked it on the head 50 years ago." The ban from the Moonrakers ended only the night before, confirmed landlord Jerry Kunkler, and Lay's nose injury was testament to the fact: he fell into a wall on his way home. Renamed Flintock, Pewsey became the notional Jerusalem in the title of the play, and Lay, as Rooster, was transformed into an almost allegorical figure. And for Butterworth, who lived there for a while in the 1990s, it provided a clear vision of the endangered rural landscape celebrated in the famous lyric from Blake. The village is a green and pleasant spot, a very English sort of Jerusalem. On Friday evening, the prototype Rooster was back in the saloon bar of the Moonrakers pub in Pewsey, Wiltshire, wearing a battered hat and sporting a big, fresh graze on his nose. When you go to the pub and it's boring, I am the sort of person to get it revved up. "If you are quiet one night, people ask what's the matter with you. "I have a reputation to keep up," he told the Observer. For Lay, though, it has proved a mixed blessing, adding to the weight of local expectation on his burly shoulders. A subversive, wood-dwelling drinker, Rylance's Rooster is a theatrical tour de force that has now established the part as a modern stage classic.
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