Mark Rylance and Jim Lichtscheidl in Nice Fish. Photo: Teddy Woolf
NICE FISH at Harold Pinter Theatre
NICE Fish is a self-referential piece of theatrical artifice.
The stage is covered with a tilted white expanse that represents the frozen ice of one of a huge lake in Minnesota. A stretched sky cloth is behind it but its supports are plainly visible, as are the lighting bars and lamp ladders unmasked in the wings.
On that ice, however, everything is meticulously real in miniature. Far off in the distance a train crosses the landscape, or it might be a convoy of road trucks.
There’s a wooden shack in the mid distance and a tiny figure that seems to be fishing. Suddenly he is there up close and full size. Ron is his name and he’s from Wisconsin. Wrapped up in orange thermal clothing, Mark Rylance makes him a wee bit slow-witted, you feel he needs looking after. He’s joined by Erik (Jim Lichtscheidl), third generation of an immigrant family from Sweden and a more experienced angler – he’s got a motor-driven drill to make a hole in the ice. Ron’s just got a hand auger.
As they fish through the winter they chat, joined at times by an old guy Wayne (Raye Birk), his granddaughter, who has a sauna in her ice shanty (Kayli Carter) and an official from the Department of Natural Resources (Bob Davis) checking permits.
That’s the play, fashioned by Rylance and US poet Louis Jenkins from the latter’s prose poems. There’s little plot, just a series of short scenes, incidents and anecdotes punctuated by blackouts and the roar of what might be a jet plane overhead, that becomes increasingly poetic and philosophical.
Whether it’s Ron dropping his cell phone down his ice hole, Wayne summing up getting older as “First you forget to zip, the you forget to unzip,” Erik catching the big one or confessing his crimes as a mail man or frozen moments in the midst of a gale what could be boring whimsy is endearingly funny and totally engaging.
That’s because Claire van Kampen’s direction produces such fantastic performances – especially from her husband, Rylance, Lichtscheidl and Birk – with an extra element added by the puppet work led by Mohsen Nouri.
Until February 11
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