About the Play:
Mojo has long been a favourite of acting
teachers for Male Monologues and Male/Male Scenes.
Mojo is a full-length drama by Jez Butterworth. In
the low-life gangster underworld on the fringes of the early London rock'n'roll scene, Soho club owners
fight for control of Johnny Silver, the latest young singing sensation. Mojo is the
hit debut play that brought international recognition to the author of Jerusalem.
Mojo is a slick
and violent black comedy set in the Soho clubland of the 1950s.
Silver Johnny is the new singing
sensation, straight out of a low-life Soho clubland bar in 1958. His
success could be the big break for two dead-end workers in the bar,
if they play their cards right and trust the owner of the place to
make a good deal with the local money mogul. Before they can dream
what to do with all the money they'll make, the owner turns up dead,
Silver Johnny disappears, the second in command takes over the bar
and power positions are juggled about. Going through the uppers and
downers filched from pocketbooks, and trying to keep a lid on the
precocious anger of the dead owner's son, the band of losers figures
out the law of the streets and who killed the boss, but not in time
to save one of their own, and perhaps their souls.
Mojo, the debut play of
then 25-year-old
Jez Butterworth,
stormed straight on to the mainstage of London's
Royal Court in 1995, went on to win the Oliver Award for Best New
Comedy (the ultimate standard
in British playwriting) and earned for its author both the Evening Standard and the
George Devine Awards for Most Promising Playwright. Since
then the play premiered
in the US in
1996 at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre; in
New York in
1997 at off Broadway's Atlantic Theater Company; in
Canada
in 1997 at Vancouver's Firehall Arts Centre. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been mounted by regional, college, and
community theatres.
Cast: 6 male
What people say:
"...the Royal Court's most
dazzling main-stage debut in years." — The Guardian
"Butterworth's play has the
verbal menace of Harold Pinter with the physical violence of Quentin
Tarantino." — The Sunday Times
"...bristles with masculine
energy and menace... a confident, ballsy play which explodes its
vision of the perils of hopeless, cocksure, violent, seedy
criminality with volcanic power." — The Stage
"Beckett on speed, savagely
funny, in fast forward, with no time to wait for Godot." —
The Observer
"...wickedly funny, incredibly
dark... a combination of strong plotting and zinging dialogue [makes]
this play addictive and disconcerting." — The Daily
Telegraph
"...a remarkable debut drama."
— The New York Times
"The language, blunt and coarse and often hilarious, pours out of the characters with the force of the blaring jukebox rock that forms a leitmotif for the dark, violent action." — The The Chicago Tribune
About the Playwright:
Jez Butterworth is a leading English playwright,
screenwriter, and film director whose work is characterized by its
distinctive language, dark comedic themes, and lowlife characters.
His work has frequently been compared to that of his mentor –
playwright Harold Pinter – and to the films of Guy Ritchie. He has
won numerous awards for his work, including the E. M. Forster Award
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.