Of ice and men

An ice floe. Two anglers. Months to kill. That’s the premise of Nice Fish by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins. The off-beat script is full of bleak and quirky insights. Rylance, who stars as the bungling Ron, admits that sometimes he gets so bored he bangs nails through frozen bananas. His pal compares dogs with wolves by observing that wolves are pessimists, jaws low to the ground, like homeless scavengers, whereas dogs are chin-up go-getters, natural corporate players, keen to win promotion in a worldwide enterprise called ‘Man’s Best Friend’. There’s a piece of obsessively nerdy rhetoric about 36-hour fishing permits which sounds like Peter Cook at his best. These treats appear early on. We’re offered some decent slapstick, too, as the fishermen get caught in a hurricane. Butter-fingered Rylance drops his phone into the lake and he suffers amusing difficulties with a collapsing tent. The surrealism becomes explicit when two stage hands enter and clear away some abandoned bits and bobs. Then a policeman surfaces through an ice hole, his clothes quite dry. A young beauty arrives claiming to have access to a sauna. Will she spark any romantic interest? No.

The false starts and the rambling plot-lines generate smaller and smaller rewards. The play has no coherence, no point of culmination. Certainly no depth. And despite its verbal ingenuity, the script is nothing more than an anthology of oddball rumination spoken by five wintering deadbeats enjoying an improvised frost fair. The play is bound to thrive commercially because of Rylance’s hilarious persona as a semi-derelict philosopher, an angelic sage who unwittingly delivers incisive truths. He’s endlessly watchable. And he’s one of the few actors who can turn a play from the slush pile into a hit.