La Bete

Synopsis

American playwright David Hirson’s rollicking 1991 play, La Bete, is a comic tour de force about Elomire, a high-minded classical dramatist who loves only the theatre, and Valere, a low-brow street clown who loves only himself. When the fickle princess decides she’s grown weary of Elomire’s royal theatre troupe, he and Valere are left fighting for survival as art squares off with ego in a literary showdown for the ages.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 8 July 2010

Maybe the anticipation of seeing Mark Rylance, Joanna Lumley and David Hyde Pierce together on one stage in American playwright David Hirson’s La Bête, a theatrical comedy of rhyming couplets set in the 17th century court of Languedoc, was too much.

For what seemed, on its London premiere in 1992, to be a gorgeously explosive and unexpected treat – Alan Cumming played the Rylance role of a bumptious vaudevillian actor, Valère – now appears trite and over-extended, even at a playing time of just over 100 minutes.

We get the point very early on: a decadent court theatre needs a shot in the arm. The argument is put forward in an astonishing tour de force by Rylance, spitting, burping and farting through his headlong monologue for well over half an hour.

But once the parameters of the play are set, and Joanna Lumley’s subdued but fickle princess – transformed from a flouncing, much funnier prince played by Timothy Walker in the Cumming version – presi...

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Latest User Review

Dan Ayling - 5 September 2010:

It's just NOT. FUNNY....

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