It is not common these days to see several actors in one major production who fail to do a play justice. The standard of acting in this country is so high and competition for work so fierce that it ought never to happen. Yet in this play at least three actors had poor diction and garbled their words, at times shrieking in monotones. There were honourable exceptions. Gerard Horan gave a strong performance as the unhappy, Morris-dancing pub landlord, and Mackenzie Crook was essential as Rooster's grumpy foil. But some of the cast members lacked conviction and stage presence at times, possibly because they were all upstaged by Rylance.

He has such virtuosity that he can convey more meanings with a gesture or a posture than someone watching can consciously perceive. So he is able to control the audience in ways we barely understand. Playing Hamm recently in a celebrated Complicité production of Beckett's Endgame, with covered eyes and crippled legs, he managed just with his voice and fingers to conjure up a variety of references, personalities and moods. The word for this is Protean, from the mythic sea god Proteus who could assume many different forms. It is the stuff of magic. 

Rylance's Protean gifts are responsible for much of the oddly magical power of this production. Without such an actor I doubt whether the complex ambitions of the play could have been realised. He makes Rooster into a man with an almost physical aura of the supernatural around him, a man who cannot be contained, a man who can transform himself into countless different things, from moment to moment. He is Chanticleer the cock, he is the sad clown, he is Dionysus, Puck, Charlie Chaplin, Falstaff, the lonely drunk, the werewolf, the pugilist, the double-jointed stunt man, the soothsayer, the hypnotist and not quite the last of an ancient bloodline of Romanies. He even, fleetingly, conjures up the man on the old Gitanes advertisement. 

Although Rylance is so central to the atmosphere of the play, it is also well served by the designer (Ultz) and the lighting and sound designers (Mimi Jordan Sherin and Ian Dickinson). The lush green English trees of the set, unspoiled somehow by the Rooster's trashy dominion, are given a supernatural intensity at times by both lighting and sound, so much so that time seems to slow down. And the strains of Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending before curtain-up, shortly followed by a musical and visual shock, combine to set up the ambiguities within the play almost before it begins. This is almost the best of English theatre, about the best and the worst of England.