It is the part of the theatre programme where the cast usually list their biggest roles, awards and assorted appearances on The Bill and Casualty. But in the programme for the new West End run of the hit play Jerusalem, Mark Rylance has also used his actor biography to criticise cuts to arts education.
“If, in modern day England, an institution like Eton deems drama important enough to have two theatres, why are we allowing our government to cut arts education from the life of the rest of our young people and our hard-pressed teachers,” he writes, in a biography that points up his schoolteacher parents’ devotion to amateur dramatics and his grandfather’s experience of acting in a prisoner of war camp.
