Some Sad News about Mark Rylance and Family

I would like to offer my condolences to Mark Rylance and his family for the sudden loss of his daughter, Natasha.

via the Guardian:

Mark Rylance has pulled out of the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony following the death of his 28-year-old step-daughter, the film-maker Nataasha van Kampen.

The actor had been due to take a central role in the Games opening ceremony, reading the speech from The Tempest that is the inspiration for the show’s title, The Isles of Wonder.

In a statement, Rylance said Nataasha – the daughter of his wife Claire van Kampen and her former husband Chris van Kampen – died suddenly last Sunday. Rylance and Van Kampen married in 1992 and have another daughter, Juliet Rylance, Nataasha’s elder sister.

He said: “Our beloved daughter and sister Nataasha passed away of unsuspected natural causes early on Sunday morning. Because of our bereavement, I have decided to withdraw from my commitment to the opening ceremony of the Olympics.”

The Rylance family also asked “that their privacy is respected at this sad and difficult time”.

Rylance added that he and his wife, who is a composer, would continue work on Richard III and Twelfth Night. The productions mark his welcome return to Shakespeare’s Globe, a theatre he ran as artistic director between 1995 and 2005.

Richard III opens on 14 July and Twelfth Night, in which Rylance reprises a memorable role as Olivia, starts on 22 September before transferring to the West End’s Apollo theatre.

Nataasha van Kampen was starting out in a career as a film-maker and had worked on commercials and documentaries.

Rylance revealed last month that he had been in two minds about appearing in the Olympics opening ceremony at all because of the corporate sponsorship.

In April he was a signatory to a letter in the Guardian in which he stated: “BP has no place in arts sponsorship.”

He told the Radio 4 Today programme last month that he sympathised with critics of some of the Olympic sponsors. He said there were “big questions about BP, big questions about McDonald’s and the amount of sugar and obesity that is costing the NHS millions.

“I have thought since agreeing [that] maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. And if people feel critical of us who have taken part, I think they’ve got a point. But on the other hand, I think all these athletes have trained … So the human endeavour aspect of it is so wonderful that I wouldn’t want it to stop. And I wouldn’t want always to be a nay-sayer or a chastiser.”

Rylance is one of Britain’s finest stage actors, winning deserved acclaim most recently for his extraordinary performance as “Rooster” Byron in the Royal Court-originated play Jerusalem, which garnered an Olivier and a Tony.

It is thought that Rylance will continue with a pop-up Shakespeare project at the end of August, part of the London 2012 festival.

Mark Rylance returns to the Bard

Mark Rylance, once again reprising the role of Olivia, gets into costume in Twelfth Night (2012)

Via BBC:

Actor Mark Rylance talks about his return to Shakespeare’s Globe, performing the Bard “by stealth” and his reservations over taking part in the Olympics opening ceremony.

He has been called the greatest stage performer in the world, and Mark Rylance has a string of awards to back up that claim.

His performance as Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron in Jerusalem won praise and plaudits on both sides of the Atlantic, including trophies at the Olivier and Tony awards.

But he made his name with Shakespeare. Indeed, Al Pacino once said Rylance made Shakespeare’s words sound as if the Bard had written them for him the night before.

Between 1995 and 2005, the 52-year-old was artistic director of the Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

Now, for the first time since he stepped down, Rylance is returning to the Globe, to play the title role in Richard III and Olivia in Twelfth Night.

“It seemed like the right time,” he says simply.

‘An old friend’

First up is Richard III. Rylance has never played Shakespeare’s notorious villain and still does not know what sort of man his Richard will be.

“I hope he’ll be as convincing as some of the characters that we see in the news and read about in history,” he says.

Such people, he continues, “are able to carry such cruel intentions in their heart without their family members – or indeed their victims – knowing that they are so lacking in empathy, until it’s too late.”

For his other performance, Rylance will appear as Olivia in Twelfth Night. He is reprising a role he played 10 years ago at the Globe, in an all-male production of Shakespeare’s comedy.

“It makes me smile to think I’m going to be her again,” he says. “There is none of that initial tension.

“It’s like meeting an old friend,” he goes on. “You pick up where you left off.”

It is a busy summer for Rylance. In addition to taking on two major Shakespearean roles, he is also involved in What You Will: Pop-Up Shakespeare, part of the London 2012 Festival.

Fifty actors – all disguised as “normal people” – will approach unsuspecting members of the public and start reciting one of the Bard’s speeches or sonnets.

The plan is “to infiltrate a place and ambush people with eloquence,” the actor explains.

He chuckles when I wonder whether some people might object to being accosted in the street, on the Tube or in a park.

“They might not be too thrilled about it, but that’s the trick – for it not to be an imposition but an invitation to listen,” he says.

“No one is going to be grabbed and told ‘listen to this, it’s good for you.’”

But he is coy about his own involvement. “The trouble is people recognise me a bit much these days, and these people have to be unrecognisable.

“But I am planning to take part,” he confirms.

Before that there is the Olympics Opening Ceremony on 27 July, at which Rylance is rumoured to be performing a speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

“I’m not saying anything, my Lord,” he laughs. “I have my 18-page contract in my pocket, which I’ve read, which forbids me to say anything.”

After admitting he will take part, however, he confesses to reservations about his role.

The question of “private sponsorship being supported by tax-payers’ money” troubles him.

“And private sponsorship for companies that are not really necessarily behaving all that ethically,” he adds.

The actor says he has “big questions about BP and big questions about McDonalds and the amount of sugar and obesity that’s costing the NHS billions”.

“It’s getting close to when the government will have the guts to say something about it – the guts, literally.

“I have thought since agreeing [that] maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. And if people feel critical of us who have taken part, I think they’ve got a point.

“But on the other hand, I think all these athletes have trained… So the human endeavour aspect of it is so wonderful that I wouldn’t want it to stop.

“And I wouldn’t want always to be a nay-sayer or a chastiser.”

Twelfth Night and Richard III open in July at Shakespeare’s Globe and will transfer to the Apollo Theatre in November.

Mark Rylance, Unplugged (New York Mag)

Mark Rylance, moments after the curtain, on October 21.
(Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos)

Mark Rylance Unplugged

With one breathtaking, breakneck 30-minute monologue, he steals the season.

By Scott Brown. Published Oct 31, 2010 – New York Mag

Mark Rylance has just stepped offstage after nearly 90 minutes—at least 30 of them spent disgorging a torrential, nonstop monologue about, well, nothing. (In rhymed verse, no less.) And despite spewing—in addition to words—belches, flatulence, and half-chewed bits of melon, the star of Broadway’s glittery Molière pastiche La Bête looks impossibly composed. To play the diabolically guileless (or is that guilelessly diabolical?) seventeenth-century street clown Valere—tormentor of fastidious court playwright Elomire (David Hyde Pierce)—Rylance crams a rotten-looking dental prosthesis in his puss, dons a rancid wig that resembles something Indiana Jones might’ve stabbed to death with a stalagmite, and decks himself in putrefied mock-chevalier garb that makes Johnny Depp’s pirate drag look Brooks Brothers sober by comparison. He also spends a good five minutes locked in a trunk.

The monologue is one of the more remarkable feats of theatrical chutzpah you’re likely to witness this or any other year. And it’s even more remarkable given its mutability. Rylance couldn’t tell you how long it is: The length varies from night to night, audience to audience. And if anyone asks him the ubiquitous question, the one thing every civilian asks every actor—How do you remember all those lines?—Rylance has an intriguing response. He doesn’t.

At least, not in the traditional fashion. Memorization is the actor’s last priority. “What I try to learn by the first day, before I go in, is not the words per se,” he says in his feather-soft London lilt. “I don’t want to learn them separate from what’s being received or offered by the other actors. Even in final dress rehearsals, I won’t know everything correctly—I won’t know it correctly before I need to know it.” He grins from ear to ear—a sweet yet vulpine smile with a hint of Valere in it. “The danger of it is, I learn a lot of things incorrectly.”

But then, Rylance feeds on spontaneity. It’s at the core of his approach to Shakespeare. (He was artistic director of the Globe for ten years.) Indeed, he hopes “a lot of things will go wrong, for something unexpected to happen.” Even in performance, he’s still improvising—not with David Hirson’s lapidary verse, of course, but with his intonations, blocking, timing, and … other things. “Like having a shit and carrying on talking,” he says, referring to the memorable mid-monologue moment when Valere, still yammering, drops a load in Elomire’s library alcove, then tidies up with pages from his host’s books. Rylance and director Matthew Warchus found “the shit” via improv. “And we put it in different places. In fact, my burp comes in different places. I just drink a lot of fizzy water right before I go on. It comes up randomly. Which is really nice for all of us.”

“I originally wanted the fart to come in different places, too,” he adds. “But Matthew eventually decided it needed to be fixed. We tried it randomly and kept missing. Because you can’t have it too loud or it’s not real.” He shakes his head, mourning the loss of this supremely organic moment: “The difficulty with the fart is, it’s run by technicians.”

Mark Rylance ready for another go at “Jerusalem” for Broadway!

It’s such a huge tragedy that I never got the chance to see “Jerusalem” either at Royal Court or at the Apollo in London. When “Jerusalem” transfers to Broadway, I’M BUYING A PLANE TICKET TO NEW YORK CITY AND SEE MY IDOL ONSTAGE!

from the Arts Beat (NYT):

Will the Tony Award-winning actor Mark Rylance (“Boeing-Boeing”) be competing against himself in the 2011 Tony competition for best actor in a play?

It’s increasingly possible. Mr. Rylance has earned rave reviews as the delightfully narcissistic street performer Valere in the play “La Bête,” which is scheduled to run at the Music Box through mid-February, and it now looks very likely that he will return to Broadway in the spring to reprise his widely acclaimed London performance as Rooster Byron in Jez Butterworth’s play “Jerusalem.”

Mr. Rylance won the 2010 Olivier Award (Britain’s equivalent to the Tony) for best actor for “Jerusalem,” a play of epic themes about the state of England, about fathers and sons and friendship — all humanity. The play centers on Byron, a drug-dealing foul-mouthed antihero and squatter deeply beloved by his friends and customers, who join him to pass the time in the middle of a wood that developers hungrily eye.

The three-hour-plus dark comedy also was named best play, and Mr. Rylance best actor, in The London Evening Standard Theater Awards in 2009. The Royal Court Theater production in 2009, and subsequent transfer to the West End in 2010, were the talk of London playgoers until the play closed and Mr. Rylance moved on to “La Bête.”

American and British theater producers have been eyeing a Broadway run for “Jerusalem” for some time, and Mr. Rylance said in an interview Thursday that it looked likely for this season. He said that the director of the London production, Ian Rickson, was on board, and that his co-star, the British actor Mackenzie Crook — who played Rooster’s buddy Ginger — had agreed to join the Broadway production assuming all necessary arrangements with Actors’ Equity can be made. (Mr. Rickson directed Mr. Crook as the forlorn playwright Konstantin in the Kristin Scott Thomas-led “Seagull” on Broadway in 2008.)

“It’s all moving ahead well for ‘Jerusalem,’ especially now that Mackenzie is coming over, because I wasn’t sure I could do it without him,” Mr. Rylance said. “Everyone seems on board for the spring, the final arrangements seem under way. The plan is to start rehearsals for Broadway three or four weeks after ‘La Bête’ finishes up.” The producers have been in talks with Equity about bringing over British actors like Mr. Rylance and Mr. Crook for the spring and making all the other necessary deals. A spokesman for the production said on Friday that there was nothing to announce at this point.

If “Jerusalem” does open on Broadway this spring, it would be before April 28, the cut-off date for plays and musicals to qualify for the Tony Awards. The best actor category will include five actors, and there are several high-profile performances on tap by men this season: from Al Pacino in “The Merchant of Venice,” James Earl Jones in “Driving Miss Daisy,” and Jeffrey Wright in “A Free Man of Color” in productions now under way, to Ben Stiller in “House of Blue Leaves,” Robin Williams in “Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo,” Joe Mantello in “The Normal Heart” (if that production comes together) and others in the spring.

So it’s possible, of course, that Mr. Rylance would not be nominated for both “La Bête” and “Jerusalem.” But two big performances in one season by Mr. Rylance, widely regarded as Britain’s leading stage actor today, could make for a very interesting Tony ballot.

 

New York Times: Mark Rylance keeping it “fresh” for La Bete

To prepare for his role in “La Bête,” Mark Rylance often plays volleyball with other cast members in the Music Box Theater.

from the New York Times: November 15, 2010

The Spike and Other Improv Lessons

By PATRICK HEALY

For all the words in the 25-minute monologue of megalomania that Mark Rylance delivers in the Broadway play “La Bête,” many of the comic payoffs flow from the stunned or dumbfounded looks, the tense or foolish body language, traded among Mr. Rylance’s crude street clown and the high-minded characters played by David Hyde Pierce and Stephen Ouimette. You can rehearse and rehearse such moments, but at their best they flow from instinct and risk-taking.

Mr. Rylance has his own preparation method: Improvisational games, the sort of unscripted, spontaneous exercises that he began learning three decades ago as an acting student in London. Sometimes he gathers with another actor or two simply to create scenes from scratch to rev up his reflexes, now that he’s been delivering the monologue eight times a week since June, on Broadway and previously in London. Lately, too, he has been joining his “La Bête” cast mates and crew members in a homemade version of volleyball amid the empty seats of the Music Box Theater before the audience streams in for the play about a showdown between high and low culture, set in the age of Molière.

“For me, improv is all about firing up parts of the mind and imagination in new ways,” said Mr. Rylance, who won a best-actor Tony Award in 2008 for his work in “Boeing-Boeing.” “Our volleyball has been a great part of that. It brings everyone into the present, and you notice the way their minds work and whether each of us has had a bad day or a good day. In the end acting is all about passing and receiving something, and hopefully taking risks and being attentive to the unusualness of stage work.”

Mark Rylance and David Hyde Pierce in “La Bete”

Such was the theme of a four-day improvisation workshop that Mr. Rylance taught early this month at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York. Joined by two theater mentors from London, Ben Benison and Roddy Maude-Roxby, Mr. Rylance focused on building confidence among the students to trust whatever improvised scene or dialogue was unfolding and to push themselves to contribute. He did this partly by using various masks, covering all or half of the students’ faces, which he always found to be a liberating tool.

“When you do improv you often inevitably start with an old feeling of boundaries and fear, of a sense that there’s a right way to do things — and one point of improv is to try a new way that might not be quite right,” Mr. Rylance said.

In the Music Box volleyball game, for instance, players can hit the ball with their hands while it is on their side of the net, but they have to butt it with their heads to hit it over the net. “You’re used to hitting it over with your hands, that’s what your instinct tells you to do, but you have to open your mind to a new direction,” he explained. (The producers of “La Bête” announced on Monday that the show, which had been selling slowly, would close on Jan. 9, a month ahead of schedule.)

As part of his work at the Adler Studio, Mr. Rylance, his two mentors and three actors from “La Bête” held a master class on improv last week for the public that doubled as a benefit for the school, raising $10,000. The evening at the Cherry Pit theater began with a bare stage as Mr. Rylance, Mr. Maude-Roxby and Liza Sadovy and Sally Wingert from “La Bête” stood on the sidelines. Slowly, each began to place stray chairs in a semicircle. They sat and glanced at one another for a good 15 seconds.

From left, Mark Rylance, Michael Milligan, Liza Sadovy and Sally Wingert during an improv class at the Cherry Pit theater.

The silence was a bit unnerving; a couple of audience members twittered as if to suggest, Would anyone come up with a good idea to start?

“Well, I think I’ll pack it in,” Mr. Maude-Roxby said, triggering relieved laughter.

“Yeah?” Mr. Rylance said.

“It’s cold!” Ms. Wingert barked suddenly. To Mr. Rylance she said, “You could turn up the heat a little.”

“Mom, I’m boiling, I’m sweating here,” he replied, creating a whole world of family dynamics and tension in one quick sentence. “I can’t, I, I, I, I can’t stay awake any longer, I’ve got to go to bed.”

“Feel my hands!” Ms. Wingert moaned. “I’m supposed to be having hot flashes, but I’m freezing.”

“You’re old, Mom,” Mr. Rylance deadpanned, drawing a huge laugh.

Mr. Maude-Roxby, who had evidently assumed the role of Dad, mumbled a protest. To which Mr. Rylance shot back, “No, Dad, she’s old.”

The six actors spent the next hour blending in masks, some bananas and a few props and chairs into more sketches. Mr. Rylance, as a shy woman talking to a suitor, used a fan to hide and reveal his facial hair to hysterical effect. Another scene seemed headed in two directions, with Mr. Rylance becoming an alcoholic at an A.A. meeting and Mr. Benison playing a flasher, until Ms. Wingert entered carrying a carton of water bottles and asking, “Who ordered the case of Dewars?” Mr. Rylance’s alcoholic winced, and then Mr. Benison said, “I drink as well — I flash best when drunk,” tying various strands of the scene together in nutty style.

Tom Oppenheim, the artistic director of the Adler Studio (and a grandson of Stella Adler), said that Mr. Rylance’s improv reflected a lesson of the school: Dialogue is only a starting point in a performance, which needs to be infused with a viewpoint, tone and body language.

“So much of acting is about seeing and listening to what others are doing,” Mr. Oppenheim said, “and it requires your senses to be fully open, which improv can help tremendously with.”

At “La Bête” the night after the Adler benefit, Mr. Rylance said he felt that the improv had a “marvelous effect” on his stage work, which requires him, as Valere, to revel in his own perceived brilliance while chastising himself for going too far — all in rhyming couplets. (“What hubris! What vulgarity What nerve!/ No, slap me! Slap me! That’s what I deserve!”)

“In that scene you ideally want to be leaping from one subject to another in desperation to impress the other characters onstage, like someone leaping from lifeboat to lifeboat as one sinks,” Mr. Rylance said. “My ability to do that varies after these last few months: I get attached to getting the same laugh from the audience that I did the night before, or another result that I liked in the past. But on Tuesday I felt completely impulsive.”

Playbill interviews Mark Rylance, Mark Rylance to perform BENEFIT GIG, and other news.

An illustration of La Bete cast: David Hyde Pierce, Mark Rylance, and Joanna Lumley. Wonderfully illustrated by Ken Fallin.

From Playbill.com:

Mark Rylance is tearing up the stage, literally, with his tour-de-force comic performance in David Hirson’s La Bête on Broadway. We spoke to him on opening night.

Tony and Oliver Award-winning actor Mark Rylance earned acclaim for his Broadway debut as the disheveled Robert in the 2008 revival of the sex comedy Boeing-Boeing under the direction of Matthew Warchus. Reuniting with Warchus for a revised revival of David Hirson’s 1991 verse comedy La Bête, first in London and currently on Broadway, Rylance again plays a clown — the earthy street actor Valere, who spews food, gas and an endless strain of self-aggrandizing iambic pentameter. The turn, which includes a 40-minute speech that dazzles audiences with quirky rhymes and sight gags, is being hailed as one of Broadway’s most exciting performances of the season — partly for the sheer stamina of it all. An hour after the curtain came down on opening night, Rylance shared thoughts about his work, his director and his wish list of roles.

What you do with the play is incredible, holding court for the first half an hour, in a rhyming-verse monologue that takes you all over the stage. As an audience member, it seems like it must be terrifying. What is it like for you?
Mark Rylance: It’s not terrifying at all, no. It’s like if I was a surfer, surfing in Hawaii or somewhere. There’s such great waves of laughter that come from the audience, and riding those, knowing when to get up on them and come down and when to move into the next one — each night’s very different. No, I don’t feel frightened about it at all. It just feels like a lot of fun, to go out and play like that.

Your co-star Joanna Lumley said you wring so much out of a few words and one couplet.
MR: I think it’s called “milking.” Is it called “milking” in America? “Milking the cow”? Yeah, I’m afraid that’s what I do.

But you’re clearly relishing the moment.
MR: Oh, I love making people laugh! It’s an amazing feeling, yeah. I’m not a very funny person in reality. I can never remember jokes and I don’t make people laugh very often. I’m a quite serious character, really. But I have a certain fool that I can play, and going out in front of people and having people laugh a lot — it’s a great job, huh? A great job.

There seems to be a great collaboration, a safety net between you and your fellow actors onstage.
MR: Oh, yeah. It’s like being in a jazz band. We’re able to expand phrases. Like James Brown would say to someone, “You play now! Play along! Go on, play that!” And then you can take it back and then you can hand it on. Even tonight, a couple of things happened that had never happened before, so inside, you have also a sense of humor and a sense of enjoying, “Oh, that’s incredible what someone does,” and passing the ball around it. It’s a wonderful cast, very good.

Had Valere been a role on a wish list for you?
MR: No, I don’t have a wish list of roles. I’d like to be able to play myself some day. I don’t have a list of roles, no. No, [Matthew Warchus] came to me with it and said, “Would you be interested?” and — yeah, certainly, I’d be interested in that role.

Your collaboration with Matthew Warchus has been so fruitful. Could you imagine having tackled this part without him at the helm?
MR: No. No. There are about three directors I work with primarily now, who I really like to work with. I like the theatre ’cause it’s live, you know, and so I do like quite a bit of freedom — not freedom to pervert the story or just draw attention to yourself, but freedom to respond to the moment, that each audience is new, and they don’t want to see last night’s performance. They want to have it tonight, and it’s live. It’s not recorded or set. So I anchor myself more in internal things rather than external things, and Matthew’s very understanding and appreciative of that, so that each night is a discovery and each night is a dance with the audience who are there. Sometimes, in matinees, they’re quieter, and then we go into other areas; and sometimes, like tonight, they’re very wild and laugh a lot, and then we go into other areas. But the main thing is to be present in the theatre, and I like working with directors [who have that] objective, too, that we’re “live and direct,” as Bob Marley would say, that we’re there and present. He’s terrific that way. We must have done about seven plays together now. Shakespeare and Sam Shepherd and Boeing-Boeing and this. Even my first play that I wrote, he directed.

There’s such a sense of magic in the play, with the language and also with what Matthew’s put into the staging itself.
MR: Yeah, he’s very, very good at the staging, and he’s very good at bringing something down to the essential ingredients. He’s a very thoughtful person. He’s a classical musician, you know. He’s a very good guitarist, and so he has a great sense of the music, of the rhythm of the piece and has a marvelous team who work with him always on the technical side, so his lighting and his sound and his conception of the design [are always honored]. He doesn’t say a lot. He’s a lovely director; he doesn’t come in with any plan, really. He sees what unfolds with the cast that he’s chosen and then shapes it very late on, so I’m able to be completely chaotic. And I must have thrown out just as many ideas as I use. … So that’s a very nice way to work. He’s a proper gardener, you know. He doesn’t just impose a scheme on the landscape. He really looks at the landscape and sees what’s there and then brings out and shapes it so that the audience can [appreciate it]. That’s what he does. He really keeps an innocence, which is what you need from a director. You need them to be really thinking about the audience — what do they need to understand the story or the joke or what’s moving about it here.

You’re doing this in iambic pentameter, so if anyone drops a line…how do you cover?
MR: Oh, you can’t, really. No, you can’t cover. I have had to make up Shakespeare. I used to forget my lines in Shakespeare, and all the other actors — after a while, they would turn to me and think, “Oh, now what’s he going to say?” and I’d have to make something up. But my memory’s got a bit better lately. I’ve been taking supplements … Memory’s an important thing for me. When that goes, then I’m done.

(Adam Hetrick is staff writer of Playbill.com. Write him at ahetrick@playbill.com.)

Mark Rylance to perform benefit gig for the Stella Adler Studio — GET YOUR TICKETS IF YOU’RE IN NEW YORK CITY!

Tony Award winner Mark Rylance will perform a special benefit show, entitled Off the Grid in Manhattan, on Monday, November 8, at 7pm.

The evening will include spontaneous improv theater with Rylance and friends in full support of the Stella Adler Studio.

Rylance is currently starring on Broadway in La Bête. He won a Tony for Boeing-Boeing, and recent credits also include the West End productions of Jerusalem and Endgame. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s most prominent Shakespearean actors, and is the former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

Benefit tickets are $100 general admission or $250 VIP seats. To purchase, click here.

NOTE: If anyone is going to the benefit gig, please send me photos so I can post it on the Mark Rylance Fan Page. Thanks.

Mark Rylance, at the after-show party for “La Bete” in NYC!

Mark Rylance, celebrating the opening of La Bete at an aftershow party in New York City. October 14, 2010

Mark Rylance, with Joanna Lumley and David Hyde Pierce