La Bête

He has teeth like a donkey, full of semi-masticated food. He farts, then flares his nostrils to inhale an appreciative sniff. His verbal diarrhoea is just as whiffy, and entirely concerned with himself. And to cap it all, he writes terrible plays that are depressingly popular. Meet Valere, the titular beast of American David Hirson's 1992 pastiche Molière comedy, brought to exuberantly repellant life in the latest astonishing performance by Mark Rylance.

Unlike its most arresting character, Hirson's play, written in verse, is a rather constipated piece, even in Matthew Warchus's nimble, Broadway-bound production, designed with painterly elegance by Mark Thompson. It's a consideration of cultural values that sets crass commercialism against art, briefly acknowledging the issue of intellectual snobbery along the way. In our modern world of rampant consumerism, rotten with vacuous celebrity idolatry, the contention that society tends to celebrate mediocrity has practically become a truism. And Hirson takes his windy time making his valid but obvious point.

Foil to Rylance's vulgarian Valere is David Hyde Pierce's playwright Elomire (an anagram of Molière), who, thanks to the favour of his patron, the Princess (Joanna Lumley), has a career, a reputation and his own acting troupe. But the Princess is tiring of his worthy works, and wants to add Valere to the company. Elomire, horrified, protests; to prove the potential of the plan, Valere delivers an impromptu performance of one his greatest hits.

Hyde Pierce is excellent, gaping and shuddering with horror, boiling with outrage and handling Hirson's rhymes with wonderful dexterity. But neither he, nor anyone else, stands a chance next to Rylance. The play's verbiage, at first dazzling, quickly turns tedious due to a lack of plot development: it fizzes and flies around in hectic, spectacular but purposeless circles like a firework in a box. The dramatic vacuum is filled by Rylance's masterly buffoon. This is comic acting of rare skill and complexity. He so entirely inhabits his monstrous creation that you cannot tear your eyes from him: rapturously vainglorious, intoxicated by self-love, an irrepressible fool who always lands on his feet. He represents the triumph of idiocy; and if the notion appalls, its embodiment is, ironically, irresistible.