U.S reviews for the Broadway version of “La Bete” come pouring in for Mark Rylance’s performance!

For some reason, U.S critics are responding a lot more favorably to La Bete than the British did over the summer. To no one’s surprise, Mark Rylance’s performance is garnering a lot of critical acclaim and praise:

Mark Rylance is a fool’s fool. Belching, bragging, accompanying his own self-aggrandizing soliloquies with stunning four-part flatulence, he tears into the first half of La Bête, David Hirson’s 1991 meta-Molière oddity, with a 400-line megalogue. In rhymed couplets. Not a syllable of which, I’m happy to report, isn’t uproarious. With all due respect to his excellent co-stars, David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley, and the fine ensemble that embroiders the show’s frilly edges, Rylance is clearly the show’s raison d’être. His performance as the irresistibly loathsome street clown Valere — a lowbrow bête noire visited upon the tidy playwright Elomire (Pierce) — is the grand prize at the bottom of a box of confetti. (New York Mag, 10/14/10)

La Bete is a beautiful piece of art about the existential traps built into making beautiful art.  (The Atlantic, 10/12/10)

In the revival that opened Thursday night at the Music Box, the rest of us get to judge whether the play deserved better. And on the basis of director Matthew Warchus’s stylish production, featuring a sensational turn by a clown from outer space, Mark Rylance, one can say categorically, unequivocally, that “La Bête” is one half of a surefire evening.

The good stuff begins the instant Rylance starts jabbering — an act he keeps up virtually nonstop for 40 riotous minutes — and ends with the marvelous entrance of Joanna Lumley as a French royal arriving in a tornado of glitter. Then, stack by stack, the meticulously amassed comic riches are subtracted, in a plot that shrivels up into limp satire and facile posturing. One comes to see why the play faded away quickly the first time around. (The Washington Post, 10/15/10)

But early in the work comes a jolt of Adrenalin: Mark Rylance (“Boeing-Boeing”) appears wearing a pair of terrible false teeth and delivers an astonishing, 20-minute soliloquy that leaves audiences in hysterics, stunned and cheering.

He almost steals the show, but there’s more: David Hyde Pierce (“Spamalot,” TV’s “Frasier”) is also onboard, at his subtle, arch best, and Joanna Lumley (TV’s “Absolutely Fabulous”) gives a spiky, haughty performance as the princess.

….Much will be made of Rylance’s initial monologue, an exhausting piece of acrobatic wordplay that threatens to destabilize the rest of the play. He emerges spitting melon, burps, scratches himself and even defecates in a chamber pot — all while delivering a torrent of words in a slightly crazed, California surfer-dude accent.

He is boastful and pompous, falsely modest and offensive. He rudely complains about the lavish dinner that was served in his honor (especially the “acidic vinaigrette”), he lectures without knowing what he’s talking about, makes up his own terms (he likes “verbobos” instead of “words” because it’s more cheery) and never lets anyone else get in a word — sorry “verbobos.” (NOLA, 10/14/10)

But the show belongs to British star Rylance, who won a Tony for “Boeing-Boeing.” As Valere, he makes his entrance spitting out slices of melon, burping, farting and even worse. It’s no fluke that the show curtain is illustrated with what looks like a stomach-shaped caption balloon filled with words.

By far, Valere’s worst characteristic is that he jibber-jabbers nonstop and nonsensically about his art, especially in a brain-dizzying speech that lasts close to half an hour. Rylance, hair scraggly, teeth protruding, delivers it with so much finesse you shake with laughter. Days later, it still cracks me up when I think about his performance. (NY Daily News, 10/15/10)

I can’t really tell from Ben Brantley‘s review in the New York Times whether he liked “La Bete” or not. But the sizzling play opened on Broadway last night and Mark Rylance gave a tour de force performance. He is just sensational as Valere, and audiences will love David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley (famous from “Absolutely Fabulous”).

Early on in David Hirson‘s 1991 play, Rylance makes his appearance and gives what amounts to a 30 minute comic monologue. It only seems like a dialogue because Hyde Pierce, who is with him on the scene, manages to take his character’s stunned silence and turn it into conversation. By the time Lumley enters–and she has some spectacular entry–the audience is mesmerized and exhausted. (Showbiz 411, 10/15/10)

He’s been described as the new Olivier, but I don’t recall Olivier ever taking on the Jerry Lewis role in Boeing Boeing or playing a street clown who spits, farts, and spews rhymed couplets of narcissistic nonsense in La Bete.Mark Rylance has done that–and more–throwing himself fearlessly into anything that lets him show his healthy love of theatrical playfulness.

In La Bete–the revival of a play that failed almost 20 years ago on Broadway–he’s a 17th Century French buffoon who speaks in 20-minute or so monologues that he makes riveting, hilarious, and likable, even though his character uses works of literature for toilet paper. (The Village Voice, 10/15/10)

and there’s many more reviews online. There is one article about Mark Rylance at Newsday, but unfortunately I am not a subscriber. If anyone of you are subscribed to Newsday, please copy and paste the article to me so I can post it on the Mark Rylance Fan Page. Thanks.

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

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

Mark Rylance’s performance redeems La Bête

Joanna Lumley, Mark Rylance, David Hyde Pierce in the London production of La Bête

From the New York Times:

LONDON — Is there anything Mark Rylance won’t or can’t do to snare an audience? When last seen on the West End in Jez Butterworth’s “Jerusalem,” for which he won every award going, this most protean of actors drank an egg, upturned himself into a pool of water, and got beaten at the play’s climax eight times a week.

His latest venture, “La Bête,” at the Comedy Theatre through Aug. 28 before a Broadway run in the autumn, isn’t nearly as exciting a play. But watch Mr. Rylance make hay of its opening half hour or more, and not for the first time you have to wonder if this deceptively elfin figure is not simply the most fearless actor around.

Theater devotees may recall the initial outings of a play written in verse that was premiered nearly 20 years ago, only to close quickly on Broadway (five eventual Tony Award nominations notwithstanding) and to enjoy a rather more successful Off West End London run that — recast — resulted in its American author, David Hirson, winning an Olivier Award. Here it is again, this time directed by 2009 Tony winner Matthew Warchus (“God of Carnage”) and with David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley joining Mr. Rylance above the title. But I intend his co-stars no disrespect when I state what for many may well be the obvious: Mr. Rylance’s way with words — not to mention his teeth — are the show.

Indeed, Mr. Hirson’s faux-Molière deconstructionist exercise can be pretty hard to take once Mr. Rylance ceases his delirious prattle as Valere, the self-consciously buffoonish theater practitioner in 17th-century France who butts garrulous heads with Mr. Pierce’s stern-faced, and largely silent, Elomire, while a pancake-faced Ms. Lumley looks imperiously on. (Her role was previously that of a man, for what it’s worth.) Equal measures deliberately logorrhoeic lit-crit and cultural broadside, Mr. Hirson’s text aims high while avidly embracing the low — to wit, an array of flatulence jokes and the like that give Valere’s verbal bravura some bodily, well, heft. (Those keen to see Mr. Rylance seated on the toilet now have their chance.)

It’s in the nature of such a play that it often critiques itself (“Is that a question? Jesus Christ it’s long,” comes the snorting reply to one of Valere’s outpourings) and that its appeal falls sharply away as thesis-mongering takes over from linguistic japery. Go for the exercise in sheer untrammeled technique that Mr. Rylance’s performance represents. And when his self-described “show time” starts to pall? Well, “Jerusalem,” thank heavens, is promised for Broadway in the spring.

La Bête. Directed by Matthew Warchus. Comedy Theatre. Through Aug 28.

reviews come pouring in for La Bête!!

David Hyde Pierce and Mark Rylance in the London production of La Bête

Rylance shines in new role:

The play is a very peculiar object indeed, but this Broadway-bound production starring Mark Rylance and David Hyde Pierce is a bright, entertaining bauble.

Directed by Matthew Warchus, “La Bete” opens on Broadway at the end of September after a summer West End run.

Its chief delight is a bravura performance by Rylance, one of the most compelling stage actors on either side of the Atlantic. He plays Valere, a fairground performer and creator of vulgar entertainment who is invited by a royal patron to work alongside the fastidious, highbrow writer Elomire (Pierce).

Rylance’s Valere is an anarchic monster, equally compelling and repulsive, who spits, burps, breaks wind and unleashes a torrent of words on the stunned Elomire.

It’s the latest in an extraordinary run of roles for Rylance, who won a best actor Tony in 2008 for “Boeing-Boeing” and this year took London’s Olivier Award for his performance as rural rapscallion Johnny “Rooster” Byron in Jez Butterworth’s “Jerusalem.”

His performance here is equally bewitching, verbally dexterous and almost recklessly physical. His opening monologue is a swooping torrent of fancy and digression that lasts half an hour — an astonishing, exhausting piece of acting.

British critics were full of praise for Rylance on Thursday: “a virtuoso triumph,” said Michael Coveney in The Independent. The Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts praised his “sheer feat of memory … and his comedic inventiveness.”

First Night: La Bête at Comedy Theatre:

At a time when good new plays like Jerusalem and Enron have made serious inroads in the West End, I was expecting, and hoping, that La Bête would have elucidated the shock of the new in the land of the dinosaurs, but it hasn’t worked out like that.

Hyde Pierce’s banked-down acting is a subtle delight, and Rylance proves yet again his astonishing, protean versatility. But his Valère is a feeble follow-up to his shape-shifting Johnny Rooster in Jerusalem in a play that promises much more than it delivers and ends up curling into a cul-de-sac of self-referential platitudes.

David Hyde Pierce: moving to the next stage:

Hyde Pierce is in town for La Bête, David Hirson’s 1992 Molière-style comedy written in rhyming couplets. The play reunites Mark Rylance with Boeing-Boeing director Matthew Warchus, and Hyde Pierce admits it was the chance to work opposite Rylance that swung it for him.

‘I saw Mark in Jerusalem,’ he says. ‘The guy can do just about anything.’

La Bete is sure not to disappoint:

“With [Joanna] Lumley and David Hyde Pierce on board for this 17th century comedy, it’s difficult to see how La Bete will disappoint,” she enthused.

Ms Khan also said she is looking forward to seeing Mark Rylance back on the West End stage, as she believes La Bete will allow him to show a more light-hearted side to audiences.