The undisputed hit of last year’s theatre scene, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem was rivalled only by Lucy Prebble and Enron for the sheer speed with which The Establishment rushed to clasp it to the rigidly upholstered bosom of respectability. To this acclaim has now been added that greatest seal of popular success – a West End transfer, which sees the show take up new residence in the appropriately grubby and faded English glory of the Apollo Theatre.

It is St George’s Day, and the annual fair in the Wiltshire village of Flintock is under way. At the centre of the action is vodka-swilling moustache-sporting Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron (a deservedly acclaimed Mark Rylance), the ex-daredevil and local drug-dealer illegally encamped in the woods. Together with his band of “intellectually subnormal outcasts” – including a Morris-dancing publican (Gerard Horan), an absent-minded professor (Alan David) and a would-be DJ (a gloriously limp Mackenzie Crook) – we see him struggle against the relentless gentrification wrought by the smart new estate, and the eviction order that can no longer be ignored.

Dressed up in all the traditional theatrical trappings of iconoclasm – the ‘sick beats’ pumping, the ‘gyppo’ hero in his stained wife-beater, free-flowing drugs and even freer-flowing obscenities all scream rebellion – Jerusalem may have punk hair and pockets filled with stink-bombs, but make no mistake it’s a middle-England grammar school boy that lies beneath – a theatrical sheep in wolf’s clothing.

This is not to say that the show doesn’t pack a respectably subversive punch – attacks on petty bureaucratic authority (characterised by two Community Liaison Officers from the Kennet and Avon County Council, snug in their high-visibility vests) provide some well-judged and genuinely funny satire – yet while entertaining, this is skilled execution rather than out-and-out originality.

What is so delightfully unexpected, so shockingly tender about Jerusalem is the unsentimental sincerity with which it both celebrates and mourns a lost England, a mythic landscape of rituals and rites, whose vocabulary – ‘greensward’, ‘bracken’, ‘copse’, ‘vale’ – is the poetry that our age of high-rise estates and suburban patios has somehow lost. Tales of giants and virgin births are unapologetically updated to encompass the A14 and Chippenham High Street, and these legends attain new mystery and magic in the mouth of ‘postmodern Puck’, Johnny.

Butterworth’s England is indeed a green and pleasant land, but at no point does he allow us to forget that the Forest of Arden – the originary scene of rural delights and romance – is also breeding ground to darker forces, to confusions, rejections and misunderstandings; it offers a home, but one premised on the perpetual condition of exile.

Until April 24. Box office: Tel: 0844 4124658 (www.apollo-theatre.co.uk).