Mark Rylance - Rave Reviews in Boeing, Boeing

As most of you know by now, I am a devout fan of the Divine Mark Rylance. He is currently starring in a Marc Camoletti (Don't Dress for Dinner) farce in London's West End. The play is called Boeing Boeing and focuses on a man who is engaged to three different flight attendants at the same time, until the arrival of a new Boeing jet messes up his "triple-life" and he has to juggle the women around so they don't find out about each other and his deception. Mark Rylance plays the faithful friend who gets pulled into the soup.

I love Camoletti's bedroom farces—I played Suzanne in a production of DDD a few years ago, and it was as much fun for the actors as it was for the roaring audiences. From the sounds of it, Boeing Boeing is tickling London audiences pink. Now I need to rob a bank and get my hiney to London to see it.


First, here's The Guardian Interview with the Divine Mark Rylance. Second, here's what the critics are saying about his performance:

The Evening Standard, Feb 20, 2007: CRITIC'S CHOICE "Allam's sexual deceiver is abetted by Robert, his sexually famished friend, whom Mark Rylance brings to timid life in the comic performance of a lifetime." The Independent, Feb 19, 2007: "It is Rylance, as his Welsh-accented innocent chum, who steals the show. From the moment he arrives, fresh-faced, from the provinces, blinking with disbelief at Bernard's real-life erotic fantasy, he is the comic heart of the play. By the end, festooned with airline handbags, his mouth smeared with the lipstick of various hostesses, he is clearly having the time of his life, as is a whooping audience in the stalls. It is a joy to behold." BBC - London, Feb 19, 2007: In an evening of (im)pure, adulterous pleasures, Allam and Mark Rylance, playing his friend from the provinces who is unwittingly thrown into the sexual maelstrom, demonstrate a propulsive comic energy that is carried on tidal waves of panic. The Independent on Sunday, Feb 18, 2007: "Rylance is a joy as Robert, blinking like a bewildered dolt but with a sneaky habit of getting snogged." The Observer on Sunday, Feb 18, 2007: "Mark Rylance - one of the greatest actors of the last 50 years - moves to a separate rhythm, while hitting the beat of the farce. As the bumpkin friend let loose in the city, he's most interior. His face - with small currant eyes - doesn't work, it thinks; his body doesn't gesture, it responds (he enters weighed down by the weight of his metropolitan hat). He lets thoughts swim out of him. Look at him and Frances de la Tour trying to outface each other: it's like watching an ant and a cobra going head to head." Whatsonstage.com, Feb 18, 2007: "Allam and Rylance show that the best of our classical actors are capable of conquering the most difficult of all acting challenges, farce... easily the funniest evening in London." The Times, Feb 16, 2007: "In many ways it's Rylance's evening. Tell me: is there a subtler comic actor in London? ...His wary, flustered wonder is a delight to behold." The Guardian, Feb 16, 2007: "The plum part is that of Robert, whom Mark Rylance invests with a Welsh accent and poll-scratching air of bemusement that reminds one of Stan Laurel at his best. Rylance, with his tenative gestures and secretive smiles, works in a different rhythm from everyone else, as befits a rural visitor. But what he dazzlingly shows is how the outsider gets caught up in the wicked Parisian game. At one point Rylance, overcompensating for the compromising undergarments found in his bag, essays a macho toughness which leads him to point his fingers like pistols and kick open a door in the manner of John Wayne. It typifies a great farce performance in which innocence is corrupted by experience."

GAWW, I need to get to London TOMORROW! I worship this man!
Performances until April 28, 2007.