For an Oscar-winner routinely described as the greatest actor of his generation, Mark Rylance is very unstarry. Wearing shorts, a frayed T-shirt, a baseball cap and an earring, plus only the lightest of tans, he could hardly be more low-key. He threads his way through the bar and slips apologetically into the seat opposite me, murmuring: “So sorry to be late”.
We’re in Peckham, south London, on the rooftop of a drama school where Rylance has just started rehearsals for the West End opening of Dr Semmelweis. It’s a play he created with the director Tom Morris, of War Horse fame, which premiered at the Bristol Old Vic last year. The drama explores the life of a Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, who worked in the maternity wards of 19th-century Vienna. Semmelweis realised that better hygiene and antiseptic could save thousands of women’s lives by reducing postpartum infection. He was disbelieved and shunned by the medical establishment and ended his days in an asylum, dying – with horrible irony – of sepsis.
