When Mark Rylance comes to town, I get tickets. I’ve seen most of his performances in New York starting with his Tony winning turn in the farce Boeing Boeing as a bumbling deadpan clueless best friend from Wisconsin. He was screamingly hilarious. Then came another Tony for Jerusalem as a drunken-party-man living in a trailer in the woods and taking on the world in a colossus of a performance, one of my favorites ever. Add in Broadway turns in La Bete, Twelfth Night (as Olivia) and the title role in Richard III plus Nice Fish at St. Ann’s Warehouse – so yes, I’m a huge fan.
Understandable then to be excited that he is back on stage here in Farinelli and the King playing the Spanish mad King Philippe V. The play was written by his wife, Claire Van Kampen. The stage is set as a grand presentation of a courtly theater with some audience members seated onstage and lit by candlelight as in “back in the day.” So disappointing then to sit through a play in which nothing really happens other than some musings from a mad king, an underdeveloped story about his wife and a countertenor who sings arias beautifully (and arguably too often). The singing and the jarringly odd contemporary language occasionally scattered throughout did not hide the lack of substance.
Despite the rousing standing ovation from the audience in the performance I attended, the entire evening is frankly dull and unfortunately pointless. Was this about music as a healing force? Art and fame? Being a King is a bummer? Castrated singers are hot? Some combination of all that? As there was no story arc to latch onto perhaps due to thin relationships between the characters, it was hard to tell. This seems to me, therefore, to be an exercise in watching Mr. Rylance act. He opens the play with a fishing pole in one hand and a goldfish bowl in the other. Mad, I tell you, mad. Farinelli and the King was a waste of time, sad to say.