![]() ![]() What I saw yesterday made it clear why people put their critical faculties on hold. Mark Rylance came to see those in the queue and was charming. Afterwards I gave a lift to the woman from the V&A who brought the DVD to the school where it was being shown to A level students, and she told of how she queued for 24 hours to get a ticket. ![]() ![]() So I read the play and, yesterday, was able to see an archive film of a performance from 2011. Questions about what Butterworth’s point might be simply don’t arise when we’ve got Rylance before us: ‘Watching him is like watching a great jazz musician hitting an amazing streak of improvisation.’ Man, you needed to be there. Professional critics gave it five-star reviews, returned to see if it was as good the second and third time as it was the first – they decided it was – and, as one of them wrote after his second visit, ‘Sometimes criticism must fall silent and give way to joyous celebration.’ With a ‘towering’ performance by Mark Rylance at its centre, it became an instant national treasure, like Stonehenge or the other fragments of Englishness that litter Jez Butterworth’s script. ![]()
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