Of ice and men

An ice floe. Two anglers. Months to kill. That’s the premise of Nice Fish by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins. The off-beat script is full of bleak and quirky insights. Rylance, who stars as the bungling Ron, admits that sometimes he gets so bored he bangs nails through frozen bananas. His pal compares dogs with wolves by observing that wolves are pessimists, jaws low to the ground, like homeless scavengers, whereas dogs are chin-up go-getters, natural corporate players, keen to win promotion in a worldwide enterprise called ‘Man’s Best Friend’. There’s a piece of obsessively nerdy rhetoric about 36-hour fishing permits which sounds like Peter Cook at his best. These treats appear early on. We’re offered some decent slapstick, too, as the fishermen get caught in a hurricane. Butter-fingered Rylance drops his phone into the lake and he suffers amusing difficulties with a collapsing tent. The surrealism becomes explicit when two stage hands enter and clear away some abandoned bits and bobs.