Nice Fish

On a frozen Minnesota lake, the ice is beginning to creak and groan. It's the end of the fishing season, and two old friends are out on the ice, angling for something big; something down there that is pure need.

Something that might just swallow them whole.

In Nice Fish, celebrated actor Mark Rylance draws on his own teenage years in the American Midwest, in a unique collaboration with critically acclaimed Minnesotan contemporary prose poet Louis Jenkins and the whole company.

This sublimely playful, profound and very funny play transferred direct from a sell-out run in New York to the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, in 2016, in a production directed by Claire van Kampen and starring Rylance and Jim Lichtscheidl.

Mark Rylance is one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation. He has played many of the great Shakespearean roles, both for the Royal Shakespeare Company and as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe (1996-2006).

He has won numerous awards for roles in London and on Broadway, most famously in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, in which he created the role of Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies (2015), and played the part of the BFG in Spielberg's film adaptation of Roald Dahl's book. On television he played Thomas Cromwell in the BBC's acclaimed dramatisation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, directed by Peter Kosminsky.

As a writer, his plays include I Am Shakespeare (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2007) and Nice Fish (co-written with Louis Jenkins; Guthrie Theater, US, 2013; New York and West End, 2016).

Mark Rylance was knighted in the 2017 New Year honours list.

Louis Jenkins was born and raised in Oklahoma, and moved with his wife Ann to Duluth, Minnesota, in 1971. His poems have been published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies, and he has seventeen collections of his poetry.

He has been awarded two Bush Foundation Fellowships for poetry, a Loft-McKnight Fellowship, and was the 2000 George Morrison Award winner. He has read his poetry on A Prairie Home Companion and was a featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1996 and at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in the UK in 2007.