A bit of West End theater before immersing myself in Shakespeare's history plays the rest of my time in London. The first hour of La Bête was laugh-out-loud funny, mostly because Mark Rylance delivered a virtuoso comic performance, highlighted by a dazzling, uninterrupted delivery that ran nearly half-an-hour at one point. Rylance had very good support from straight men David Hyde Pierce (from Frasier) and Stephen Ouimette (from Slings And Arrows). The entire play is in rhyming couplets, which worked better than I thought. The denouement does fall a bit flat after such a thrilling start, but seeing Rylance as the idiot poser Valere was well worth the price of the ticket. (By the way, this production is Broadway bound after its run here in London.)
