"Jerusalem". Magdalen Garden
Four years ago, the Daily Telegraph declared, with blind, patriotic inaccuracy, that Magdalen College had cancelled St George. The reason they gave was that the college had not celebrated the patron saint of England's special day with a dinner. The Telegraph neglected to mention that Magdalen has had hardly any St George's Day dinners in the five centuries of its existence. Nor have most of the other colleges. But for a few days the President was besieged with outraged emails from retired colonels, which she replied to with her accustomed patience and clarity. Now Magdalen has got its own back. In staging Jez Butterworth's magnificent, tawdry, poetic, potty-mouthed masterpiece Jerusalem in the President's Garden, the college has found a deeper and more meaningful commemoration of St George than any dinner could possibly evoke, even if it served dragon steak. Jerusalem takes place on St George's Day, when the good, and not-so-good, folk of Flintock in Wiltshire hol...