Mark Rylance offers a masterclass in bravura acting as the fearsome but oddly endearing Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron in Jez Butterworth’s smash hit play Jerusalem. The marvel is that after two-and-a-half years in the role — at the Royal Court, in the West End, on Broadway and now in the West End again — this great actor shows no sign of fatigue or staleness. A date with Rooster remains the hottest ticket in town. Grab one if you can.

Drunk and druggie, our appalling anti-hero is everything conventional society resents and fears. That he is so clearly a role model for the teenagers who flock to his illegally parked, silver-sided caravan in a leafy bosk in rural Wiltshire (designs by Ultz) makes him an especially dangerous figure to authority. He represents the spirit of rebellion, the values of an older, less regimented age in England’s green and pleasant land — the title refers to Blake’s poem, of course, not to the Middle East.

The hymn version of it is beautifully sung by a solo voice at the start of the play, which switches on an instant to a cacophonous night-time shindig in and around the van. Action proper begins the next morning as Rooster clambers from the wreckage, performs a remarkably athletic ablution — hand-standing head first into a water butt — then pours himself a start-up cocktail of milk, various powders and most of a bottle of vodka. There are shades of Bertie Wooster’s eye-popping reaction to Jeeves’s morning bracer as this takes effect. At the opposite end of the respectability curve we might note more than a touch of Derek and Clive in the play’s many foul-mouthed verbal exchanges.

Fuelled for the day, Rooster is ready to greet the gang, beginning with his principal lieutenant Ginger (Mackenzie Crook, on fine comic form). He had been elsewhere the night before and an amusing running joke develops as other youngsters crawl from various hidey-holes about the place — emerging ‘rats’, Rooster styles them — to tell him what a great bash he’d missed.

First, though, we meet The Professor (Alan David), an intelligent, well-bred and slightly dotty elderly neighbour with an evident fondness for the liquid refreshment that flows freely in Rooster’s company. Most raffish circles have such a figure. As Butterworth makes clear in a programme note, the characters and the things they say and do are all firmly rooted in what he has observed.

This includes the amazing stories told by the fabulist Rooster — a meeting with giants claiming to have built Stonehenge, for instance. His gifts as a raconteur can be seen to account in part for his popularity with almost all of those he encounters, including a careworn local pub landlord and Morris dancer Wesley (Max Baker), who has very good reason to discourage his custom, and a local council official (Sarah Moyle) charged with ending his illegal occupation.

Brilliantly directed by Ian Rickson, this gripping play steadily builds towards a shattering climax. Even at more than three hours, one could not wish the performance a second shorter.

Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. Day seats from £10.