What a catch — a Wolf Hall star in the West End
MARK RYLANCE has taken the bait and will return to the London stage . . . in a play about some fishermen.
The actor, who won an Oscar and a Bafta this year for his work in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge Of Spies and the BBC drama Wolf Hall, will star in a play he co- wrote with poet Louis Jenkins about ice fishing called Nice Fish.
It’s a project in marked contrast to Spielberg’s movie adaptation of roald Dahl’s The BFG, in which rylance plays the bighearted title character and which had cineasts at the Cannes Film Festival calling home for comparisons to ET.
The BFG, which also features the glorious Penelope Wilton as Her Maj, opens in the UK on July 22.
Nice Fish will see rylance kitted out in fleece and thermals playing ron, who accompanies his friend to fish for yellow perch on a frozen lake in Minnesota. It’s a meditation on friendship, solitude and landscape.
The piece is based mainly on Jenkins’s prose poems, with some linking dialogue by rylance who, although born in Ashford, Kent, spent his adolescence in Minnesota’s neighbouring state, Wisconsin, where his parents taught at the university School of Milwaukee.
Iterations of Nice Fish have been performed in Minneapolis and Massachusetts. But the version that will open in the West End for a 12-week run in mid-November had a spell at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn earlier this year, with rylance’s wife Claire van Kampen direct- ing. I understand that van Kampen wants to bring rylance’s costar, Jim Lichtscheidl, and the other three members of the cast over to London, too.
Certainly, the Midwestern sensibility shared by rylance and Lichtscheidl is vital to the show.
Meanwhile, rylance is working with Spielberg again, on ready Player One, based on Ernest Cline’s novel set in a futuristic, virtual reality world. And he will also appear in Christopher Nolan’s new picture, Dunkirk.