Something fishy about Rylance’s free tickets
OSCAR-WINNER Mark Rylance is angling to give away free tickets to his new play — to anyone dressed up as a fisherman (complete with rod) or as the catch of the day.
The actor will star in a show called Nice Fish, about two old friends ice-fishing in Minnesota. The piece, which he coauthored with poet Louis Jenkins, will run at the Harold Pinter Theatre for a limited time from November 15.
Rylance chuckled as he explained the thinking behind his fishy fancy dress plan to me. He said he doesn’t like theatre boxes being used (as they often are) for sound and lighting equipment.
‘The boxes are very important to me in West End theatres, and I have it in my contract that they have to be made available for the public. On this occasion, the ones dressed as fishermen. Or fish.’
Seats will be given, on a first-come-firstserved basis, to those who arrive at the box office by 6pm (or 1.30pm for matinees) dressed as a turbot or a trout, a marlin or a mackerel; or in angling gear. There will be a maximum of four free seats per performance. Cod pieces are not allowed. Rylance said the front-of-house staff will decide on the best costumes.
The tenor of the daily competition is in keeping with the play’s dry, mid-western humour. Rylance developed the show after discovering Jenkins’s poetry a few years ago. He liked the way the poet explored the ‘marriage of opposites’.
‘Usually the poems are funny, because he develops something that’s very mundane and you think: “Where’s this going?” And he’ll turn on a dime with one word or idea, and it’s transformed.’
He dramatised some of Jenkins’s poems that involve a pernickety warden’s attempt to collect a fishing licence fee from two friends, played by Rylance and American actor Jim Lichtscheidl (born in Minnesota).
Rylance used that instance to give an indication of ‘what these fishermen might be running away from . . . one of them is lots of laws and authoritarian stuff’.
The star, who won a best supporting actor Oscar for his role in Steven Spielberg’s film Bridge Of Spies, laughed and noted: ‘There are a lot of regulations for the freest country in the world.’
Nice Fish has already been staged in Minneapolis and Massachusetts, and last spring had a stint at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Rylance and the director — his wife, Claire van Kampen — revise the production with each new iteration.
Rylance likened it to the film and TV series Fargo, in that it’s about a not-sowell-known aspect of American culture. He thinks British audiences will get it, though. And so do I.
The actor spent his formative years, until the age of 18, in Wisconsin, while his British parents were teaching at a school in Milwaukee. When I questioned him about his own fishing habits, he joked: ‘You’re fishing again, Baz!’
However, he did allow that he spent his summers home from the U.S. in Kent, where he would fish at Lake Chad in Sissinghurst, as well as other ponds in the area. He said he never caught ‘anything that you’d want to eat’.
Rylance was speaking at the end of a long day working on the Dutch set of Christopher Nolan’s new film, Dunkirk. On his days off, he scoots over to Leavesden, in Hertfordshire, to film scenes for Steven Spielberg’s picture Ready Player One.
On July 22, Rylance opens in Spielberg’s movie version of Roald Dahl’s The BFG.
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