Rylance on ice sinks deep into the surreal
Nice Fish St Ann’s Warehouse, New York ★★★
Mark Rylance won a Bafta last Sunday and is up for an Oscar next weekend for his part in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies. The British actor joked that Spielberg “rescued me from the slums of the theatre!” But “slumming” it is still what he does best and perhaps why he has returned to it at this critical point in his career, starring in the New York premiere of the 2013 play Nice Fish, co-written by him and directed by his wife, Claire van Kampen.
Rylance is the kind of actor you’d more than willingly watch do nothing. Which is sort of what Nice Fish is about: just two men, waiting it out on the ice, hoping for something to bite.
In the programme notes Rylance says: “I have a feeling that all good theatres stand near a crossing over water. It concentrates people.” Like the Globe, St Ann’s, the small but esteemed Brooklyn theatre, is waterside and so is the setting for Nice Fish. The stage is a bleak, melancholic sweep of frozen lake – a white sheet, rippled to evoke the striations of windswept snow. It’s beautiful, but don’t be fooled into thinking this will be anything as mundane as a meditation on nature. The set, and the play itself, become progressively weirder. At one point characters assemble beneath a fake palm tree strung with fairy lights. How did it get there? Who knows. The real and the surreal are as unaccountable as each other.
Speaking in a stunned mumble, like a man permanently gobsmacked by life’s irreducible oddness, Rylance is appealingly gormless in his fluorescent orange coldweather gear. His get-up includes a flappy-eared hat, which delivers its own comic moment as a puppet snowman. Here, and during every moment Rylance is saying or doing anything (lipsynching to a plastic singing novelty fish, for example, or being hilariously unhelpful as his fishing mate battles to erect a tent) the laughs roll up from the audience. His eyebrows alone could steal this show.
But every moment of the play in which we’re denied Rylance’s presence – and there are too many of them – sags. He is, to both the play’s detriment and advantage, the only thing you really want to watch.
Part of the problem is the script based around the work of Louis Jenkins, the Minnesotan prose poet. The poems make for great tragicomic soliloquies, but the overall effect is disjointed, killing the chances of these characters connecting with each other or making much narrative sense.
As if anticipating and skewering these gripes, the play’s last moments see Rylance in a pink nightie, say “old people are exiting this life as if it were a movie”. And in comic unison the pair snap their gaze to the audience and say: “I didn’t get it.” By this point we’re sufficiently steeped in this world of absurdity to concede that “getting it” is missing the point. The point being that there isn’t a point, only the charm of loopiness over logic. Just like Rylance himself.