While recently in New York City we saw this play, and I have so say is the best one I’ve seen in a great while…..

     … I’ll not bother here with detail of plot, what it is - what it is not, though I’m sure it will be some time before I see another play so well written in rhyme.

  The following I took from the web site and have paraphrased it since it didn’t sound right.  American playwright David Hirson's rollicking 1991 play, La Bete, is a comic tour de force about Elomire (David Hyde Pierce), a high-minded classical dramatist, quite the pessimist, who loves only the theater, and Valere (Mark Rylance), a low-brow street clown who loves only himself, on which he will incessantly expound.

  When the fickle princess (Joanna Lumley) decides she's grown weary of Elomire's royal theatre troupe and its theory, he and Valere are left fighting for survival in her court as art squares off with ego in a literary showdown of retort.

  At first one wonders just what is it about the clown who blunders his way through the first 30 minutes of the play.  But the script so eloquent mesmerizes the listener to such extent that one cannot help but be swept in.  Mr. Rylance has a cadence so rhythmic and seemingly unending that it builds the humor - sending the audience into a trance.

  How fun it must be to write completely in rhyme that I myself might try it sometime.  One who has knowledge of couplet and verse may think this play possibly worse but as for me it was delightful to see it.

  It was something