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

La Bete in photos (Broadway production, 2010)

Mark Rylance and David Hyde Pierce

Mark Rylance, Joanna Lumley, and David Hyde Pierce

Stephen Ouimette and Mark Rylance

Mark Rylance

Mark Rylance

Mark Rylance and Liza Sadovy

La Bete Videos!

La Bete is opening on Broadway on October 14. If you will be in New York City, go see this.

a VERY funny trailer with Mark Rylance, David Hyde Pierce, and Joanna Lumley!

a SNEAK PEEK of La Bete

GO SEE IT! I wish I could go…

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

Who is Mark Rylance? a NYC critic raves

From IndieWire:

Among those in the running to be named “greatest stage actor” is Mark Rylance (center), an actor that I noticed for the first time this weekend. Some know him for his role in Patrice Chéreau’s 2001 film, “Intimacy”, but Rylance is acclaimed for stage work. At a party last night, few of those that I polled informally had heard of the actor and former artistic director of the Globe theater.

So, I was introduced to the Brit in the third preview of “La Bête” yesterday afternoon. Wow.

Rylance bursts onto the stage through a side door and right into an incredible 30 minute comedic monologue. Thirty minutes that start with him spitting out food as he rapidly speaks, ending when he curls up into a wooden box at the center of the stage. It’s truly something awesome to experience (and is delivered in rhyming couplets).

Set it 17th-century France, “La Bête” features Rylance as a self-absorbed street performer at odds with an uptight theater director (David Hyde Pierce) who are each essentially trying to gain the affection of an intrigued Princess (Joanna Lumley!!). Not surprisingly, it loses a bit of momentum when Rylance is silenced or off stage. But, for the power of Rylance’s hilarious endurance of a performance, its a real must-see.

The trailer below doesn’t really do the show, or the performance, justice:

No surprise that he’s getting rave reviews… it is Mark Rylance, after all

Rylance as one of the 5 Best Hamlets…. and Broadway Tickets now on sale for La Bête

From Broadway.com:

Tickets are now on sale for the riotous comedy La Bête starring Tony winner David Hyde Pierce, Tony winner Mark Rylance and Joanna Lumley. Performances begin September 23 ahead of an October 14 opening at the Music Box Theatre. Tony winner Matthew Warchus directs.

Set in 17th century France, the Moliere-inspired La Bête is a farce written in iambic pentameter that tells of a government-sponsored theater troupe that is shaken up when the group’s patron insists that a buffoonish street performer joins the company. The show is currently playing a pre-Broadway engagement in London at the West End’s Comedy Theatre.

Laughs are sure to be aplenty in this hilarious, star-filled comedy. Be sure to get your tickets today!

Mark Rylance was mentioned as one of the best 5 Hamlets in this recent article:

“Mark Rylance as Hamlet at the RSC
Ron Daniels directed this production back in the 1980s, with Mark Rylance in the lead role. To me Rylance is always fascinating to watch in anything he does and his Hamlet didn’t disappoint me despite high expectations. The production was highly acclaimed and toured all over the UK and the United States.”

London Theater Journal: Mark Rylance, With an Accent

Mark Rylance in La Bête

from Ben Brantley at the New York Times:

London Theatre Journal: Mark Rylance, with an accent (July 21, 2010)

The ghost of Molière keeps showing up at the same place in London, a rather surly specter with only slight variations in his disguise. The last time I visited the Comedy Theater, in January, it was to see Martin Crimp’s contemporary reworking of Molière’s “Misanthrope,” which had Londoners lining up to see a beautiful British movie star (Keira Knightley by name) play a beautiful American movie star.

Last night, I returned to the Comedy to take an advance look at the Broadway-bound revival of David Hirson’s “Bête” which is generating plenty of happy buzz (although mixed reviews). This is largely because of the presence of Mark Rylance, whose recent series of big, brilliant stage turns (“Boeing-Boeing,” “Jerusalem”) have nudged him toward the stature of an antic Laurence Olivier.

Mr. Rylance plays Valere, the title character of “La Bête,” a name of varied implications. In abstract terms, he is the beastly embodiment of vulgar popular tastes that pull culture to its lowest common denominator. But as an actor and playwright who has captured the attention of a powerful princess (Joanna Lumley), Valere is also the particular bête noir of the 17th-century dramatist Elomire (played by David Hyde Pierce), whose name is an anagram for…that’s right, Molière.

Seeing these two productions on the same stage within months of each other has allowed me to perceive telling similarities in these Molière visitations in London. (If I sound coy on the subject of the merits of this “Bête,” which had a notoriously brief run on Broadway in 1991, it’s because I won’t be reviewing it until it comes to New York this fall.)

Most obviously, there are the central characters’ parallel rants against the pandering crassness and hypocrisy of ruling tastemakers — of Alceste (a sort of stand-in for Molière) in “The Misanthrope” and Elomire in “La Bête” – which seem especially pertinent in the age of “American Idol” and its democratic descendants. So does the implicit sense of resignation and defeat that concludes both works. Then as now, it’s ultimately the people’s choice that makes stars out of artists (even under a monarchy), and you can either live with that or slink off into virtuous, cranky, elitist solitude.

But what I found most intriguing was that in order to portray the nemesis of our artier-than-thou heroes, two British actors took on American accents. In Ms. Knightley’s case, this made immediate sense (though I don’t think it helped her performance), as her character was a rising Hollywood starlet. And it is true that though they speak in intricate rhyming couplets, most of the cast members of “La Bête,” directed by the devilishly stage-savvy Matthew Warchus, also use a nonregional American accent that doesn’t call attention to itself.

But Mr. Rylance has turned that same all-purpose American accent into the ultimate instrument of obnoxiousness. As his egomaniacal, insult-proof, crude, rude and socially triumphant Valere spits out (with much real spittle) some of the longest monologues ever written, Mr. Rylance summons those geocentric visitors from the States you hear braying and ranting, loudly and obliviously, in theater lobbies and museums in high tourist season.

Or rather, perhaps, some fiendish caricaturist’s notion of the type that borrows elements from Homer Simpson, Jerry Lewis and Bill Murray’s more fatuous comic alter-egos. How fascinating that at a moment when West End theaters are full of shows by and about Americans (from “All My Sons” to “Legally Blonde”), the most compelling ugly American of all should be a Frenchman played by an English actor.

From New Statesman:

A gift from the gods

La Bête
Comedy Theatre, London SW1

There’s a problem developing with Mark Rylance. After years doing, no doubt, God’s work running Shakespeare’s Globe – and therefore being largely hidden from all but tourists and parties of schoolchildren – he has returned to the West End and shown himself to be, by some distance, our best stage actor. He is to Simon Russell Beale what Ian McKellen was to Antony Sher in the 1980s, and Olivier to Gielgud and Richardson in the 1960s. And this is a problem?

It can be, for not only can such talent reduce the rest of a cast to the status of a backing group, it can make a play look very much better than it is. This was certainly not the case last year with Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, in which Rylance, as Rooster Byron, seemed to invent as he went along a kind of theatrical naturalism; but it is so with La Bête, a briefly celebrated pastiche of Restoration comedy by the American playwright David Hirson, forgotten since the 1990s until this extraordinary revival in London.

The presence of David Hyde Pierce (Niles from Frasier) and the blessed Joanna Lumley would ensure this revival a decent run in any case (it is soon off to Broadway), but Rylance quickly gains total dominance in the central part. The audience becomes the helpless subject of his Valere, a street entertainer whose crude populism has tickled the fancy of a Languedoc princess. As patron of the state theatre troupe, she insists that its leader, Elomire, played by Hyde Pierce, take him on. Elomire is horrified, but not as horrified as we are when his rival enters his office.

From a mouth impeded by hideously protruding front teeth, Valere lets loose gobbets of food and a flood of undigested thoughts, boasts, would-be witticisms, self-deprecations, dumb intellectual insights, flattery and every other kind of absurd self-aggrandisement. This tsunami begins with a protestation of piety (“Devotion comes to nothing if we come to summarise devotion in a sum – a tiny play on words . . . Doth please you not? I swear I made it up right on the spot”) and is dammed a full 30 minutes later only when he stuffs a soiled handkerchief into his own mouth.

At midpoint, as if to emphasise that this logorrhoea is indeed verbal diarrhoea, he takes a shit in the lavatory behind Elomire’s book-lined office. While this is happening, it is worth glancing occasionally at Hyde Pierce’s face, which is a masterclass – an anthology of reactions. But Rylance’s performance goes beyond acting to somewhere more disturbing. His mania is even more alarming than his ego. Uninhibitedness scarcely begins to describe it.

Unfortunately, Hirson has built his play upside down. Instead of this tour de force being the climax, it comes at the beginning. After that, the play begins a slow decline. Elomire gets a page of monologue in riposte, but its invective is ordinary: “Your ignorance is even more colossal – your brain is like some prehistoric fossil.”

As the princess, Lumley has imperious presence, but she becomes funny only when she reverts to spoilt-baby mode. Valere performs an extract from his play The Dying Clown and it is terrible, but not terribly funny. Elomire’s troupe is then called in to help perform Valere’s equally disappointing longer work, The Parable of Two Boys from Cadiz. Its moral, ironically, is that the world will worship the worthless showman over the worthy philosopher – but the play within the play is less entertaining than the play without. Most disappointing of all, perhaps, the script reveals Valere, in the end, not as mad and sad but stupid and cynical, although Rylance maintains the manic energy, literally climbing the walls of Mark Thompson’s elegant, Old Master set.

The only subtlety in the piece lies in Hyde Pierce’s interpretation of his part. It suggests that Elomire, the serious actor-writer, is as much an egotist as Valere and, for that matter, the princess. Each is convinced of the invincible rightness of his own subjective taste. Otherwise, La Bête‘s message is dull: however popular, bad art is inferior to good. In fairness, I don’t think Hirson thought he was writing a serious play. A textual note calls for it to be performed in “absurdly high-comic style, at lightning speed”, which the director Matthew Warchus and his troupe achieve. The problem is Rylance and the question he prompts: can a performance so outstanding be in aid of an extended sketch? A funny (if uneven) play about meretriciousness looks, itself, meretricious. We have Rylance to thank, and blame, for that.

From Tottenham Journal:

THE amazing Mark Rylance takes centre stage in this hugely enjoyable Broadway-bound revival of David Hirson’s 1991 comedy. His performance is a comic tour-de-force, wringing the most from Hirson’s impressive script, cleverly-written in rhyme in homage to Moliere.

Rylance’s Valere – an egotistical, vulgar street clown who loves only himself – is a grotesque character. He talks through mouthfuls of melon, finding faults with the dinner party hosted by high-minded dramatists Elomire (an anagram of Moliere).

His opening speech is a whopping 30 minutes, during which American actor David Hyde Pierce (Elomire) finds himself playing almost a bit part. Hyde Pierce fights back as the rivals trade verbal blows in their battle for the royal approval of the fickle princess (Joanna Lumley), who has invited Valere to inject some new life into Elomire’s elitist and staid theatre troupe.

But there’s only one winner here – and Rylance’s performance is so dominant and enlivening that, in the few moments during the two-and-a-quarter hour production that he is not on stage, you find yourself waiting eagerly for his return. Lumley, too, does her best to wrest back the initiative, but seems slightly uncomfortable in her role. – KEITH ARCHER

“La Bête” Aftershow Photos of Mark Rylance and Company!

Thanks to regular reader Susan, for alerting me about these new photos she took outside Comedy Theatre after a showing of La Bête. You can view more photos on Susan’s Flickr set.