Is there no end to Mark Rylance’s talents? Yes, and it’s around here.

As an actor Rylance is indisputably a genius; as a director he’s no slouch either. As a playwright, however, he ain’t all that. Several years ago I Am Shakespeare, his play about “the authorship question”, had to be pummelled into shape during its run not simply as regards its content but even the title itself (it began as The BIG Secret Live 'I Am Shakespeare' Webcam Daytime Chat-Room Show). Nice Fish is more succinct in every respect, but not much more shapely.

It’s credited as a co-authorship by Rylance and Minnesota-based prose poet Louis Jenkins, and Rylance’s work consists of little more than envisaging an overall context, then cueing up serial recitations of a selection of Jenkins’ pieces. The context, inspired by Rylance’s Milwaukee adolescence, is ice fishing on the Great Lakes: the moderately serious Erik (Jim Lichtscheidl) and the amiable dufus Ron (Rylance) drill holes in the glacial winter surface of Lake Michigan and settle down for a day of musings, broad prop-based comedy (including one of those board-mounted animatronic singing fish) and encounters with a Department of Natural Resources official and a couple of folk who may be actual icephiles or simply personifications of particular philosophical attitudes.

It scarcely matters which, given Jenkins’ writing. Some of his prose poems are surreal anecdotes, others sound like the koans of a kind of Scandi-American Zen meditation which Ron and Erik are in one sense practising. They may work as award acceptance speeches (in which capacity Rylance has deployed some of them ere now), but as theatre dialogue they pretty much sound like “Here comes another one now”. The chunk-by-chunk impression isn’t helped by director Claire van Kampen’s approach of breaking up brief scenes with total blackouts.

Rylance is of course compelling in performance, and as usual manages (apart from a couple of moments of pure mugging) to convey the impression that his brilliance is effortless. He clearly finds profundity in Jenkins’ work, which he tries to indicate by moving in the final phase of the 90-minute piece towards a clutch of more ontological pieces. Ultimately, though, they say nothing more than “Gee, life’s a funny old thing”, and the whole brief evening is about as enlightening as Billy the big-mouthed bass crooning “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”.

Written for the Financial Times.