La Bête gets a rave from The Times

This critic really dug it. I like her description of it as “grown-up panto.”

We’ve waited for this one, in wondering hope. Joanna Lumley! David Hyde Pierce who was Niles Crane in Frasier! A Broadway transfer in the bag, and our own peerless changeling sprite, Mark Rylance! It even promised a debate: high culture versus populism and the conscience of the artist. Wow!

It’s a tough gig, raising that much expectation, and it’s no common play. Written for Broadway in 1991, set in a French court in 1654, entirely in rhyming couplets, it defies categorisation. You are forced to laugh all through and then confront a bleak unresolved ending to the central question. The bête of the title is the beast in us which triumphs when we laugh at deep concepts. Maybe it wins.

As it opens, we observe an angry colloquy between Elomire the court playwright (Pierce) and his colleague Béjart about a street-clown their patroness has foisted on them: a bombastic ninny who does gags like dressing up a cow as Anne of Austria.

The comic rhymes were brilliantly delivered from the start yet we stiffened, longing for the star. So in he flounces, chewing on a melon and spitting uncouthly: Rylance as Valere the clown, in a multifeather hat and layers of grimy frills, ringlets, stripes, slit-sleeves, gallygaskins and random frogging. His introductory monologue lasts 35 minutes including a fart, several burps, a visit to the lavatory, insane boasting, and wilful misreading of the (beautifully judged) expressions of horror on the faces of the resident artistes. Imagine a drunken hybrid of Ken Dodd and Jim Carrey invading a senior common room: Pierce’s face alone is worth the ticket.

Rylance, of course, shines. Who else could hold us, hysterical yet horrified, for the first half of David Hirson’s headlong play as he preens and digresses, a compulsive deluded entertainer rebuilding the very language. Yet the world around him is as clownish: after an absurdist interlude with a monosyllabic maidservant we see the Princess herself: Lumley in Gloriana deshabillé and scarlet wig like the Red Queen in Alice. She tries to reconcile the two camps by getting Valere to perform his play about twin brothers, in which the girl chooses the juggler over the philosopher. Elomire is enraged, the Princess rages back, praising artists without “a moral cross to bear”. By which time Rylance is ten feet up the bookshelves, treating us to an elfin, wounded, sensitive yet crazy expression I cannot erase from my retinas even now, not that I want to.

At one stage, standing on the table, he declares “God love the critics! Bless their picky hearts!” Much nervous laughter in the stalls.

But why pick? It’s grown-up panto, it’s clever, it’s quite deep, it could not be better done. You may hate it, but you’ll never see anything quite like it again.