Mark Rylance gives free tickets to fish, will it catch on?
When Sonia Friedman announced she was bringing Mark Rylance‘s play – penned with Louis Jenkins – over to London from a run in New York, there it was in writing, as bold and off-beat as the great Rylance himself: dress as a fish or fisherman and get free tickets to see Rylance in Nice Fish.
As far as ticketing offers go, it certainly reads as one of the more wacky. There are lots of on the day or last minute cheap seats offers in the West End – you can queue up for £15 tickets at Curious Incident on the day of performance, CumberHamlet had £10 seats on offer on a first come first served basis (yes I did queue for that one from midnight), Harry Potter offers the #FridayForty – forty tickets released for the following week. This year a production of Moby Dick at the Union Theatre sold £15 tickets to anyone in school uniform but, it must be said, not many shows ask you to dress up. And very few ask you to dress up as a cold-blooded, aquatic vertebrate.
I was hooked, line and sinker, by their plan and, in the interests of investigative journalism, I felt it important to explore exactly what producers were carping on about. There were more questions, in my mind, than answers: did it matter what sort of fish? Could you turn up on your own as a fish or did you need an accompanying fisherman? Would a whale count? What does a fisherman actually look like? Would a fisherman have to have a rod? Would you have to sit through the entire show in your costume? Where the hell do you find a good fish costume? What if someone else turned up at the door – would we have to fish slap each other down to get the tickets?
So with the help of my trusty co-worker and fellow dressing up enthusiast Emily, I decided to attempt it. Nice Fish better be fintastic, sorry, fantastic.
It turns out it’s harder to find a fish costume than you think it might. Our COO found a cracking lobster frock, but isn’t a lobster a crustacean and not a fish? After many online searches and the daydream of an idea that I might make a fish costume myself, DIY Blue Peter-style (yeah right), classic theatre costumiers Angel Fancy Dress, on Shaftesbury Avenue in London, helped. Their one fish costume was a glorious shark.
Emily found some ravishing yellow waterproofs, wellies and a stripy t-shirt and we were ready. The only thing to do next was to head through Soho dressed like a codplete perch. Sorry, I mean complete berk. Luckily the plaice is full of broad-minded Londoners (or just really, really hungover people) and no-one battered an eye-lid.
The performance we went to was a preview matinee, which meant there weren’t many fishes queuing, but once the show opens and the ticketing offer spreads, it’s worth remembering that there are only four tickets available this way.
We turned up at 1.30pm (show started at 2.30pm) as audiences began to draw in and we immediately became minor celebrities. Someone even asked if we were part of the show. When the box office manager confirmed we had bagged our tickets, the next question was whether we could head off, change and come back. "No," came the fairly blunt answer. Which means that while you can take a hat off and put a fin to one side, essentially you will be watching the show in a costume. Make sure, therefore, that it’s not too hot. The next question was whether Rylance himself would notice us – yes, we were told, there's a chance he might wave, if you're lucky.
Seating-wise, fishermen and friends are put in boxes either side of the stage and while it feels pretty regal, the angles aren’t great. Boxes weren’t made for good sight lines and while you can see most of the action, you don’t get a great feel for the staging.
But we sat, shark and his fisherman in the box throughout the show – shark teeth glinting in the spotlights – and hopefully we weren’t too much of a fish-traction to the actors (we totally were). Did we get a wave at the curtain call? Let's just say, Rylance took the bait.
Nice Fish runs at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 11 February. Angel Fancy Dress is on Shaftesbury Avenue in London.
