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.”

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.

A British Star with a Midwestern Accent

From The Wall Street Journal:

Mark Rylance, photographed in New York City (Therese & Joel for The Wall Street Journal, 2010)

Before every performance of “La Bête,” a satire that opens on Broadway Thursday, Mark Rylance chugs half a bottle of sparkling water. Then he delivers a roughly 25-minute monologue in rhyming verse that is by turns loony, ingratiating, egomaniacal, desperate and, shall we say, gastro-intestinal.

“The belches just come whenever they come—that keeps it fresh,” he says of the burps that punctuate the monologue.

The tension between high and low art is at the crux of “La Bête.” Mr. Rylance plays Valere, a buffoonish street performer in 17th-century France who becomes a favorite of the princess, much to the dismay of the court’s chosen playwright, Elomire, played by David Hyde Pierce. Joanna Lumley, from British television’s “Absolutely Fabulous,” plays the princess who tries to bring them together.

The play was last in New York in 1991. It closed after just 40 performances, though it went on to win an Olivier Award in London the next year. The new revival ran over the summer in London, where it received uneven reviews amid a chorus of raves for Mr. Rylance’s performance.

The British actor portrays Valere as a rube who spews honeydew melon when he talks and makes up words like “verbobos” (his term for “words”). Mr. Rylance tailored the character for American audiences, since the play was written by an American, David Hirson, and he says the London production was aiming for a New York transfer from the start. He’s adopted a Midwestern accent for the role, which comes somewhat naturally to him. When Mr. Rylance was a small child, his father, an English teacher, moved the family from Kent, England, to Connecticut and later Wisconsin, where Mr. Rylance stayed through high school.

Inspiration for Valere came partly from watching Bill Murray movies: Mr. Rylance admires that actor’s total commitment to foolishness in certain roles. (“I’m sure he’s totally unaware of me,” Mr. Rylance says of the movie actor.) He also attempted to mimic the speech and gestures of some American and British friends (he hasn’t told them they’re part of his research).

The heart of the show is a monologue, which runs for 22 pages in the 165-page script. The speech ends with Mr. Rylance packing himself into a trunk onstage. The crew tried to feed a tube into the box so he could sip water afterward, but that proved too tricky and now he simply scrunches in the space and tries to catch his breath.

Mr. Rylance primarily lives in London with his wife, the composer Claire van Kampen, who wrote the music for the play. After he wraps up “La Bête,” a limited engagement scheduled to end in February, the actor is expecting to return to the New York stage this spring with a hoped-for transfer of “Jersualem,” a story of a degenerate ex-stuntman for which he received a 2010 Olivier Award. He was last on Broadway with “Boeing-Boeing,” a comedy that won him a 2008 Tony Award (instead of an acceptance speech, he read an obscure poem). Matthew Warchus, who directed the recent hit “God of Carnage” as well as “Boeing-Boeing,” reunites with Mr. Rylance on “La Bête.”

Until the end of 2005, Mr. Rylance served as the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London and drew controversy by questioning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Though he rarely appears in movies, he has a role in “Anonymous,” a film by Roland Emmerich that is built around the authorship debate and set in Elizabethan England.

Mr. Rylance has never had much patience for the assumption that stage actors are desperate to get to Hollywood. As he’s gotten older—he’s now 50—he says he’s found more joy in his stage job, and he tries not to beat himself up over mistakes the way he used to.

Recently, he forgot to put in a pair of false teeth, which complete his transformation into Valere by turning his face into a clownish mask. He could have held the show and run up four floors to his dressing room to get them, he said, but instead he went on without them. As a result of the error, he says, he had to speak slightly differently, which in turn shined a new light on some of the lines.

“Sometimes you have to break the piggy bank to get the coins out,” he says. “Mistakes, I tend to think, are sometimes that kind of event.”

Original Link

Laurence Olivier, Judi Dench, Mark Rylance? Who is the greatest stage actor ever?

Oh come on, that’s not really fair. They are/were all equally talented, amazing, and powerful. But of course, if I was forced to choose just one, it would be MARK RYLANCE, hands down. From the Guardian:

The Ancient Greek performer Thespis failed to make the cut despite his somewhat groundbreaking work, as did the considerably more alive Simon Russell Beale.

But those in the running to win the accolade of greatest stage actor do include Laurence Olivier, Judi Dench and a relative upstart in the form of Mark Rylance.

The trade newspaper The Stage is today embarking on a search for the greatest theatre actor of all time and has canvassed 16 experts to come up with a top 10, from which the winner will be chosen.

The list includes four late actors. Aside from Olivier, there is Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Paul Scofield, who died two years ago. Playwright David Hare declared Scofield’s King Lear “the greatest classical performance of my lifetime”.

There are three women in the shape of Dench, Maggie Smith and Vanessa Redgrave, and three working male actors in Ian McKellen, Rylance and Michael Gambon, now appearing in Krapp’s Last Tape in the West End of London.

The Stage is now throwing the choice out to a public vote over a 10 week period. Deputy editor Alistair Smith said it was the first time it had tried anything like this in its 130-year history.

“We have long been the publication for all those who work in the theatre industry, but especially actors, and we hope that our hunt for the greatest stage actor will help celebrate the huge range of talent with which our stages have long been blessed.

“Any search like this will be necessarily subjective, but we hope that the survey will be both fun and informative and help highlight the vast, impressive legacy of fine performers who have brought so much enjoyment to audiences over the years.”

That the search is subjective may be of little consolation to the most obvious omissions from the top 10 – there is no Kenneth Branagh nor any foreign actors. The only actor born outside of England is Gambon, a native of Dublin.

The 16-strong panel who chose the top 10 included producers, directors, performers and critics.

The newspaper intends to run a feature advocating one of the top 10 each week and anoint the winner at Christmas.

In 2001 Paul Newman was voted the greatest movie actor of all time in a survey of film experts.

Taking into account such criteria as box office success, Oscar nominations, acting range and marriage appeal, Newman topped the list.

Tom Hanks came second in the list. He was followed by James Stewart, Harrison Ford, Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Tom Cruise and Gary Cooper.

But many others think the poll is pointless and even offensive. I can agree with their sentiments. From the Independent:

But there is a bigger problem in playing the game of “greatest of all time”. How do you compare performers from different eras? Sir Peter Hall tells a story of how he had always thought Garbo the most understated actress. Then recently he saw an old film of hers, Queen Christina, on TV, and to his amazement she was suddenly overacting. Styles of acting change with each generation, so much so that Garbo can indeed appear to have changed her own style once we have become accustomed to far more understated performances than she ever gave.

It is because styles of acting change that comparing actors from different eras is a little pointless. Trying to decide whether Mark Rylance would have upstaged John Gielgud is as fraught an exercise as wondering whether Roger Federer would have beaten Rod Laver, or George Best would have outplayed Lionel Messi. We will never know.

What do you guys think?

Mark Rylance: Acting is just play. You have to look for the joyful thing

Mark Rylance at a rehearsal studio in London, 2010 (photo by Andy Paradise)

Acclaimed by some as the best since Olivier, but derided by others for being ‘as nutty as a fruitcake’, the iconoclastic actor says pleasure is the secret behind his success

By Brian Logan, 4 July 2010

from The Independent:

Mark Rylance practically has a trademark on the phrase “best actor of his generation”. But the question is seldom asked: why is he the best? And how?

A staple of the British stage for three decades, the 50-year-old is enjoying his purplest patch yet, after a Tony award for Boeing Boeing on Broadway and last year’s astonishing turn as misfit and rebel Johnny Byron in Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth’s hymn to English non-conformism. Indeed, his Byron is by wide consent the stage performance of the century so far, bringing Rylance to the sort of popular acclaim rarely seen since Olivier walked the boards.

A paid-up non-conformist himself, Rylance has spoken of his own “love of mystery and a love of questions”. So can he help with a mystery? Why do I enjoy watching him on stage more than I do any other performer?

Finding the answer may not be easy. Actors are notoriously unenlightening about acting. There’s a scene about it in Rylance’s new play, David Hirson’s La Bête, which ruthlessly mickey-takes self-important thesps. “It’s ludicrous to verbalise my art,” says one. “For truly I become the words I say! / That chicken – when it’s squeezed within your play – / I WAS that chicken, I BECAME that hen …”

La Bête is a comedy in verse, a hit in London in 1991, when it starred Alan Cumming, but famously a flop in its native USA, where it closed after 25 performances. On the page, Hirson’s script is a hilarious nugget of cod-Molière, in which a high-minded dramatist in 17th-century France is forced by his royal patron into partnership with an uncouth street clown.

Rylance plays the clown, just as he did under the same director, Matthew Warchus, in Boeing Boeing three years ago. His character, Valere, is a preening buffoon, deeply in love with himself and the charming impression he thinks he’s making. He’s also a force of nature, with a domineering, motor-mouth charisma Rylance admits will be “wonderful” to play – even if “to release that side of yourself into daylight is a little shocking”.

Rylance is softly spoken and seems vulnerable; innocent, indeed. Received wisdom casts him as an eccentric, or even, in The Daily Telegraph’s words, “as nutty as a fruitcake”. Critics cite Rylance’s habit of giving cryptic speeches at awards ceremonies. Receiving his 2008 Tony, he recited an obscure prose-poem by the Midwestern writer Louis Jenkins.

There’s also his insistence that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays of Shakespeare, which – given that Rylance was the founding director of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre – raised a few eyebrows. Mention that he had Jane Horrocks pee live onstage in his Hare Krishna version of Macbeth, and you’ve got Rylance-as-weirdo bang to rights.

But what the Telegraph considers weird may simply be, in Rylance’s case, unselfish, iconoclastic and left-wing. A champion of progressive causes, he is an ambassador for Survival International, which campaigns for indigenous peoples. His artistic tastes are esoteric: he talks about his own work with Phoebus’ Cart, the company he set up with his wife, the musician/composer Claire van Kampen, as “experimental”, and his Globe tenure was one ongoing investigation into Elizabethan and other elemental theatre practices. He has a hippie’s distaste for matters financial, and left the Globe after a dispute over money. He laments how “the religion of today, consumerism, bombards our grosser appetites, and affects our sensitivity to the subtler things in life”. Rylance’s so-called eccentricity is his way of reactivating that sensitivity.

Which is all well and good, but it doesn’t help with my inquiry into the mystery of his qualities on stage. In Warchus’s words, “he was born with the ability to lie in an astonishingly convincing way. It’s supernatural. Add to that his showmanship, and his [ability to communicate] psychological truth – which are usually mutually exclusive – and you have something virtually unique.” But when I ask, for example, whether he possesses “an X-factor” that other actors lack, he comes over uncharacteristically snippy. “You’d have to ask Simon Cowell about that kind of shit.”

According to Butterworth, Jerusalem demanded a lead actor “who gives you goose pimples when he walks on stage. [And] Mark just has all that naturally.” Butterworth spent many years writing Jerusalem, and did so with only one man in mind for Byron: Mark Rylance. The result was a rollicking tragi-comic elegy for the demise of old England, personified by the mercurial, drug-dealing, yarn-spinning Johnny “Rooster” Byron, as he contemplates eviction – and worse – from his caravan on St George’s Day.

Born in 1960 in Ashford, Kent, Rylance spent his childhood in Wisconsin, where his father taught English. He still speaks with a transatlantic twang, and his outsider status is often ascribed to that ex-pat upbringing. On the one hand, Rylance was embraced early by the mainstream: he studied at Rada, played Hamlet for the RSC and won his first Olivier, for Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, when he was 33. But at the Globe, his work was persistently ignored or patronised by critics, and in interviews at the time of his departure, a bruised Rylance abjured Shakespeare and toyed with emigrating (again) to the States.

That’s all changed now. “It’s five years since I’ve done a Shakespeare play, and I’d like to do a few more,” he says. He’s planning to reunite Phoebus’ Cart and re-engage with “original practice” versions of the Bard. And he hopes to revive his cumbersomely titled Big Secret Live ‘I Am Shakespeare’ Webcam Daytime Chat-room Show, which premiered at Chichester in 2007. But that’ll all have to wait until 2012, because he’s holding out for a US run of his beloved Jerusalem, and is committed to playing La Bête in both London and (if it succeeds) New York.

Such is the life of an erstwhile company man turned freelance actor-for-hire. La Bête is a play about that very dichotomy: should we be team players or follow our own path? It’s a question more people will be asking, says Rylance, as they are “thrown back on their own resources” in a recession. “And some may find it a great relief,” he adds, putting a positive spin on economic meltdown, “that they no longer have to answer to some suit, and that there isn’t some ladder they have to be progressing up all the time.”

More specifically, La Bête is about art and compromise. Should artists defend the purity of their vision – or water it down to satisfy sponsors, collaborators and their audience?

In 1991, The New York Times accused the play of preaching high-mindedness while practising vulgarity. That, as the play’s many defenders pointed out, is unfair – La Bête neither deplores the clown nor defends the cultured snob (played, in this revival by Frasier star David Hyde Pierce). But “it would be an ideal outcome,” says Rylance equably, “if people continue to have angry arguments at the end, and for the debate about, say, commercial versus subsidised theatre to carry on long after the show”.

Rylance won’t take sides in that debate. “I can’t judge,” he says, because “I’m not able to be outside the play, to be un-influenced by knowing all Valere’s lines and being him.” Rylance’s focus is the character and “finding a way of being present, and making every connection believable between each word, sentence, and each beat.” In this case, that means encountering his inner egomaniac. “We all have vanity, don’t we? And we all sometimes think, ‘if I said now what I’m thinking about this person, he won’t be my friend any more.’ We all have a Broadmoor special hospital side to ourselves.”

If Rylance has an inner Broadmoor, it’s very inner indeed – although he does tell a damning anecdote against himself, about the time he and his wife gave a Q&A in New Zealand and he ruthlessly hogged the limelight. But these days, Rylance goes easy on the recrimination. “I used to be so dominated by self-criticism,” he says, “that I had difficulty enjoying myself at acting for a long time.”

This is as close as I get to a clue to Rylance’s brilliance on stage. When I tell him that his Boeing Boeing, his Jerusalem and his hilarious Olivia in the Globe’s all-male Twelfth Night are three of the most enjoyable performances I’ve ever seen, there’s no explanation forthcoming of how he does what he does. (He cheerfully acknowledges those actors-on-acting pitfalls.) But I do get a paean to pleasure – which might be the next best thing. “I remember Jimmy Cagney in a beautiful interview he did, saying that acting is child’s play. And certainly, for me, the core of it is the enjoyment of play-acting.”

By this, he means not just his own enjoyment, but the audience’s. Here, he goes off on one about theatre architecture. “Imagine the Old Vic with no seats in the stalls,” he raves. “Fantastic! All the seats in all stalls should be removed. There should be bars in there instead, and people standing around with food and drink and the ability to slip out easily if the play is boring.” Theatre should be direct, wild and fun.

“My objective in a play,” he says, “is to get the audience involved. Get them out of their concerns and into the concerns of a fantasy world. So when they then step back into their lives, they’ve had the effect that a holiday gives you, when for a few fleeting minutes after getting home, you think, ‘oh – I see what needs to be done with my life’.”

But that effect, that enjoyment, depends on Rylance’s own. “When I was a young actor,” he recalls, saddened by the memory, “I used to bang my head against doors like a sledgehammer until they would open. Now, I just play. I look for the joyful thing. Those three parts you named were just so enjoyable. And rehearsing this play, too, I laugh so much, I worry that I won’t be able to keep a straight face come the performance.” So much for the mystery: to the best actor of his generation, it’s quite straightforward. “Nowadays, I just really enjoy myself.”

La Bête opens at the Comedy Theatre on 7 July

Curriculum Vitae

1960 Born in Ashford, Kent, the son of two English teachers. His father moved the family to the States when Rylance was two.

1976 Played Hamlet at high school in Milwaukee before going on to study at Rada.

1980 Joined the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company two years later.

1990 Formed the Phoebus’ Cart company with Claire van Kampen, whom he married in 1992.

1995 Named the Globe’s first artistic director and led it until 2005.

2001 Starred in Intimacy, above, which featured a scene of unsimulated sex between Rylance and his co-star Kerry Fox. The film won a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

2002 His cross-dressing performance as Viola in his all-male production of Twelfth Night won him the London Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for best Shakespearean performance and an Olivier nomination.

2005 Won a Bafta for his portrayal of weapons expert David Kelly in The Government Inspector.

2007 Won a Tony for his Broadway performance in Boeing, Boeing.

2010 Won an Olivier for his portrayal of Johnny Byron in Jez Butterworth’s acclaimed Jerusalem.

2010 Playing Valere, a “low-brow street clown”, in the revival of David Hirson’s La Bête at the Comedy Theatre, London.

2011 Will appear in Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, a “blockbuster” period movie said to explode the Shakespeare myth.

Making his mark: Mark Rylance the West End wonder

by Hermione Eyre, July 2, 2010.

Mark Rylance at the English Touring Theatre, SE1, in June

From London Evening Standard:

‘Ah-buck-buck-buck-buck…’ Mark Rylance is flapping his elbows and strutting like a chicken in the middle of the street. He’s demonstrating how, every night, the hens that appeared on stage with him in Jerusalem, his five-star Royal Court then West End hit, would make their way to the stage ‘of their own free will’. Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, the character he created, was a teller of tall tales and so is he: ‘They lived on the roof of the theatre and they would come down the stairs, with the stagehand following, clucking like two old actors. Ah-buck-buck-buck… ‘ Then Rylance, in the opening scene of a bravura performance that won him his most recent Olivier award, would spring a handstand, dunk his head in a horse trough, and swallow one of their eggs raw.

For Rylance, who turned 50 in January, these ‘feel like auspicious times’. He’s long been considered one of our finest classical actors for his work at the RSC and as the founding artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. As Al Pacino once said, he plays Shakespeare ‘like it was written for him the night before’. Lately, contemporary roles have brought his genius to a wider public – 2008′s trolley-dolly farce Boeing-Boeing, and Jerusalem, about a drug-dealing pied piper. Next, he will appear at the Comedy Theatre in La Bête with Joanna Lumley, playing the naff troubadour Valere, whom he likens to ‘the voiceover of Come Dine With Me’.

When I meet him outside his rehearsal room in Southwark, he is wearing a natty little hat and a small ‘alternative’ hoop through one ear. He played Peter Pan in 1983­ – not a dry eye in the house, apparently – and almost could today. He has lost the bulk he gained for Jerusalem, but still has that mystical gift of the gab. His voice is beautiful, resonant and slightly Anglo-American, belonging to a profession more than a country.

Mark Rylance at the English Touring Theatre, SE1, in June

‘I celebrate all the eight folk festivals of the year,’ he tells me softly. ‘Midsummer, midwinter, the equinox, the fire festival and the others in between. They’re very helpful to my year. There’s the sense of the wheel turning, a sense of thanksgiving for where we are, for the gifts we have. I celebrate them with friends, at a restaurant, eating, drinking, laughing, and offering beauty to the gods.’ How does one do that? ‘With words, songs, thoughts, colours, fruits and flowers.’ I imagine him placing a pineapple under a tree for Pan. ‘We’re as much part of nature as these stones are,’ he says, gesturing to the cobbles underfoot.

His favourite place to learn lines is down by the Thames: ‘Tamesis, the black mother, the dark, chaotic root of life in the city that’s gathered all this life around it…’ He climbs over the barrier and gets up on to a ‘big concrete block in the river, looking over at the National, imagining Elizabethan life and watching life as it is now’. He remembers being taken there for the first time by Nigel Hawthorne, in between matinees of Tartuffe at the Barbican, and talking to the ‘mudlarks’, the people digging for treasure on the river’s shore. ‘I love the way she [The Thames] sifts and sorts the rubbish out by weight…’

Polytheism comes naturally to him. Raised in Milwaukee by British parents (teachers who emigrated for work), he was brought up Catholic and Anglican, to please both sides of the family. ‘We went to different churches on alternate weeks, and on Christmas and Easter, we would have to go twice.’ It sounds confusing. ‘My experience of church was always of translating – oh, this must mean that. And ritual. My mother would put on Christmas pageants, with candles, that were just magical.’

He got into spiritualism in the late 1980s, around the time he met his wife, the composer and musician Claire van Kampen, when they were working on The Wandering Jew at the National Theatre. The two left to form their own company, Phoebus Cart, and took The Tempest touring British ley lines. Immersing himself in Shakespeare led him to esoteric schools of thought such as Kabbalism and what he refers to as cosmic geography. In southeast London he and his wife brought up her two daughters from a previous marriage, Juliet and Natasha. ‘We would have loved to have had children together, but it wasn’t possible,’ he has said.

Juliet is now starring in Sam Mendes’ As You Like It at The Old Vic, opposite Christian Carmargo (of Heroes), her real-life husband. Rylance refers to her as ‘my daughter’, and she to him as ‘Dad’ and despite being close to her biological father, the architect Chris Perret, she took Rylance’s surname. ‘I’m very proud,’ he says.

There’s also a worldly side to him. After Jerusalem, on stage at the Apollo, he would stay up into the early hours playing poker with the stagehands. As an actor-manager he got the Shakespeare’s Globe off the ground and ran it for ten years. (His all-male Twelfth Night, in which he played Olivia, was a high point.) You can’t do that without business sense. The only equivalent career that comes to mind is Kenneth Branagh’s, his contemporary at RADA.

Arriving from America, Rylance found it ‘claustrophobic’ at RADA and has only one friend from his three years there, Michele Wade, who runs the Soho patisserie Maison Bertaux. He had ‘a big falling out’ with his other best friend, ‘an older actor, a great inspiration and a very troubled person; I’m drawn to troubled people’. They founded a theatre company together, The London Theatre of the Imagination, and Rylance lost £8,000; they played Iago and Othello, which didn’t help. ‘The trust was gone and our paths split,’ he says. ‘I’m often the egg-breaker. This could be bad for me in early companies. When I feel there’s a truth that’s not being spoken, I find that hard to deal with. I’m better now, more patient, but in the past I’d be explosive.’

In the 1980s he had a hedonistic phase, a dalliance with drink and drugs. ‘I found the more interesting people were dropping out and finding an alternative way of being. I was lucky enough to be around good people and it didn’t get so excessive that I damaged myself. It was something I had to do. I’d been working very hard on theatre since I was 13, 14, and I needed some space, something to calm me down. I do have a need for wildness.’

One night in 1982 he threw an End of the World party at an old manor outside Stratford where Gielgud and Olivier had stayed, now derelict. ‘A number of us were living there. We hired a van to drive everyone from the theatre in costume and we hired a butler from Oxford called Mr Boddy. The conceit was that it was the end of the world and the deity was choosing the next Adam and Eve from Shakespeare’s characters [Sinead Cusack as Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew and Ian Talbot playing 'the small man', a character in Edward Bond's retelling of King Lear, were chosen]. I was the Angel Gabriel, wearing a dress, the dress I’d worn in Genet’s The Maids. Helen Mirren kept putting her hand up the back of it, right up my Y-fronts…’

The party ended with Rylance’s mock-arrest by a police sergeant he had roped in. ‘Many of the actors were so out of their minds by then that they attacked the policeman; all these strong, radical RSC actors demanding to see his warrant…’ The good news is that the party was filmed. The bad news is that Rylance won’t be showing it any time soon.

His 50th birthday party, in January, was tame by comparison. ‘I just hid at the bottom of the garden for a while, overwhelmed by so many close friends.’ Recently he’s had thoughts about his own mortality. There are plays he wants to finish, poems that he writes for friends, and a big studio film he’s about to star in, directed, oddly, by Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000BC), positing that Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford. ‘I hope I’m not going to die early. I read some of Van Gogh’s letters recently and the number of paintings he did during the last 75 days of his life show an enormous speeding up to get past the finishing post. Of course I don’t compare myself to him in any way but I really do have to calm myself down.’

His grandfather came to him in a dream when he was on holiday in Spain a few years ago and told him, ‘Play some sport, boy, and get your hands in the soil.’ He now plays volleyball as ‘it gets all your competitiveness out before a performance’ and he’s growing runner beans across a trellis he made himself. ‘There’s a part of me that’s quite spiritual and a part of me that’s quite earthy,’ he says. ‘Soulful people and soulful works of art are often the ones that are trying to mediate between the two.’ His rituals involve saying thank you to the mystical source of his success. ‘I don’t feel my inspiration comes from me. Of course, I have to learn my lines and do some work preparing, but I don’t feel my ideas are self-generated. Often, during the performance, the ideas and the humour just come in’ – he looks up into the bright June sun – ‘from somewhere else.’

La Bête is at the Comedy Theatre (0844 871 7627)

Mark Rylance and the Shakespeare Authorship controversy

Mark Rylance and actor Colin Hurley, who played “William Shakespeare,” the Stratford man, in Mark’s play, “I am Shakespeare,” hold the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt in Chichester, September 8, 2007 (Link)

Mark Rylance has always been one of the most vocal public figures on the William Shakespeare authorship controversy. For a simple explaination, Rylance, along with other figures (both living and dead) such as Sir Derek Jacobi, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and Mark Twain, have always questioned whether Shakespeare really wrote all these plays or if it was actually a group of playwrights who wrote under one name, or if it was simply a lone playwright such as Christopher Marlowe (who was murdered early on in Shakespeare’s career as an emerging playwright) or Francis Bacon.

In 2007, Rylance, along with Sir Jacobi, signed the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt, in hope to spark off an academic debate on Shakespeare’s authorship claim.

Mark Rylance signs the Declaration before his matinee performance (Link)

From the Guardian:

The literary conspiracy theory that refuses to go away, and which has a growing army of supporters all over the globe, reared its head in Chichester this weekend.

Two of Britain’s most distinguished Shakespearean actors, Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, the original artistic director of the new Globe Theatre, have launched a formal ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’ about the identity of the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon.

The actors said the document, which has been signed by 300 people, is an effort to provoke academic debate.

After the last matinee performance of I Am Shakespeare, a play that questions the identity of Shakespeare, at the Minerva Theatre in the West Sussex town yesterday, Rylance, the star, joined Sir Derek to present the controversial declaration to Dr William Leahy, the head of English at Brunel University in west London. Later this month Leahy is to convene the first MA in Shakespeare authorship studies.

The key belief of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition is that a body of literary works which displays an understanding of law, history and mathematics could not have been written by a mere commoner from an illiterate household in Warwickshire. What is more, no records exist that the man usually assumed to be the greatest playwright in western literature ever received payment or personal preferment for his writing. Shakespeare’s detailed will, in which he notably left his wife ‘my second best bed with the furniture’, fails to refer to any theatrical legacy. The coalition contends it is proof of cause for doubt.

From BBC:

Almost 300 people have signed a “declaration of reasonable doubt”, which they hope will prompt further research into the issue.

“I subscribe to the group theory. I don’t think anybody could do it on their own,” Sir Derek said.

The group says there are no records of Shakespeare being paid for his work.

While documents do exist for Shakespeare, who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, all are non-literary.

In particular, his will, in which he left his wife “my second best bed with the furniture” contains none of his famous turns of phrase and it does not mention any books, plays or poems.

According to an e-mail from John Shahan (the Chairman of Shakespeare Authorship Coalition), this is what Professor James Shapiro (author of the recently released book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?) had to say about Rylance’s involvement:

“On 9 September 2007, a recently formed website — ‘The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition‘ — received six hundred thousand hits. That extraordinary response followed a well-orchestrated campaign that had culminated in a press release announcing that a pair of major figures of the British stage, Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, had signed a petition now circulating on the Internet, a ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare.’ They had done so following a performance of Rylance’s play questioning Shakespeare’s authorship — I Am Shakespeare — and had timed the announcement to coincide with the news that a graduate program in Shakespeare authorship studies had been established at Brunel University in London.

“It is a skillfully drafted document, the collaborative effort of some of the best minds committed to casting doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship. Its title is inspired, combining the uplift of a historical declaration with that long-established sense of fairness that guided juries to just verdicts, “reasonable doubt.” A whiff of the courtroom is apparent throughout, as ‘the prima facie case for Mr. Shakspere’ is shown to be ‘problematic’ and the ‘connections between the life of the alleged author and the works’ no less ‘dubious.’ The testimony of a score of expert witnesses — including Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, and Justice Blackmun — is introduced into the record. And by not specifying a single candidate, it brings together under one roof proponents of all of them. The declared purpose is to get as many people as possible to sign on to the commonsensical position that ‘it is simply not credible for anyone to claim, in 2007, that there is no room for doubt about the author.’ (p. 218)

The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt is open for anyone– that’s YOU– to sign and contest Shakespeare’s authorship claim. It is available on The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, an organization of which Mark Rylance is a patron of.