Three-Time Tony & Oscar Winner Mark Rylance Will Lead Nice Fish in the West End

After talk that Mark Rylance would return to Broadway this fall in Farinelli and the King, comes the news that he instead will headline Nice Fish in the West End. The three-time Tony and Oscar winner co-wrote the play with poet Louis Jenkins, and the Daily Mail reports that the production is set to open in London for a three-month run in mid-November. It will be helmed by Rylance's wife, Claire van Kampen, who also hopes to bring over his co-star, Jim Lichtscheidl.

Rylance won the Tony for Twelfth Night, Jerusalem and Boeing-Boeing and was nominated for Richard III (which played in rep with Twelfth Night); he has also appeared on the Great White Way in La Bete. He received the Oscar for Bridge of Spies and an Emmy nod for his recent work in the screen adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall.

Rylance conceived and wrote Nice Fish with Jenkins; they originally adapted the play for Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater from Jenkins’ book about ice fishing in Minnesota. A new American Repertory Theater production was staged by van Kampen last year, followed by a recent run at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

Nice Fish takes place on a lake in frozen Minnesota where the ice is beginning to creak and groan. It’s the end of the fishing season, and two men are out on the ice one last time, angling for answers to life’s larger questions.

In the meantime, Broadway will continue to angle for Rylance’s return.