“When they first told me that the screenplay is set in Auschwitz, I said, I
think I've done that',” explains Sir Antony Sher in his gently deep voice.
The Olivier award-winning actor who has played a host of history's worst
monsters, including Hitler, Richard III and Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect
of apartheid, will appear on our television screens next week putting God on
trial in the middle of a Nazi concentration camp.
These all seem unfathomably dark roles for one so unassumingly amiable.
Sher, 59, has spent the past two months in retreat, quietly painting an
enormous canvas of personal portraits. He enters the pub in
Stratford-upon-Avon where we meet wearing a shaggy beard and a baseball cap,
carrying a plastic carrier bag. A short man with powerful shoulders, he
glances about anxiously, worried that I might not recognise him.
Away from any of the immense characters he portrays, Sher can certainly appear
unprepossessing. He perches on our window seat, nursing a white wine,
fidgeting constantly as he explains his new role in God on Trial, a
BBC Two drama by Frank Cotterell Boyce, the writer of Welcome to Sarajevo
and 24 Hour Party People. This is Sher's second spell portraying an
Auschwitz victim. In a stark one-man stage act three years ago, he brought
to life Primo Levi's harrowing memoir, If This is a Man, and took it
around the world.
“I have done Primo in theatres and on television and thought that I had
finished all that,” he says. “But the moment I started reading Boyce's
script, it gripped me. It's an extraordinary idea; the inmates have a debate
about God, and it's set, well, in Hell.” The drama is based on an historical
story of how a group of Auschwitz prisoners, their faith tested by the
Nazis' barbarity, put their God in the dock, charged with breaking his
covenant with his chosen people to protect and care for them.
“Effectively it is based on a legend; there are no records and no survivors
from the trial,” Sher acknowledges. “Boyce has written the story in a
fascinating way. You keep swaying from one argument to another.”
But it is no mere historical exercise, he adds. “The Auschwitz debate has huge
currency now because fundamentalism on both sides is coming head to head.
Even in schools we are going back to questioning whether Darwin was right,”
he laughs incredulously.
“It's so important to keep talking about the subject, particularly in a medium
like TV. I'm so pleased that the Beeb could make it at a time when so many
people say that television is being dumbed down.”
The hell of fascist persecution has particular resonance for Sher, a Jew who
realised he was gay while growing up in apartheid-era South Africa. The
experience, he says, turned him against organised religion. “I feel very
Jewish in my identity, but absolutely not in a religious sense. I was
brought up as a casual orthodox. But as my sexuality was awakening, there
was a sense that it was made diseased by my religion. In my life, all the
worst atrocities have been done in the name of religion. The Dutch Reform
Church supported apartheid by finding obscure biblical passages that
purported to justify it.”
Not everyone responds to atrocity in the same way, he acknowledges. “Primo
Levi came out of Auschwitz and said, there is no God'. Elie Wiesel, the
other great Holocaust writer and survivor, came to see me playing Primo, and
said he still practises his faith, although he thinks it was wounded in
Auschwitz.”
Sher moved to England in 1968, aged 19, to be free of repression, though it
took time for him to feel liberated. “I pretended not to be white South
African because I felt very ashamed of the society I had come from. I
decided I'd better not be Jewish because I couldn't see any Jewish leading
actors, and for the first few years here I wasn't gay either.” Indeed, there
remains no trace of Africa in his accent.
Early setback bolstered his resolve
Although he had shown prodigious childhood talent as an artist, he decided to
study acting in Britain, but was rejected by the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art with a letter that Sher recalls as saying: “Not only have you failed the
audition and we do not want you to try again, but we seriously recommend
that you think about a different profession.” That rebuff bolstered his
resolve. He was accepted at the Webber Douglas Academy and, via roles at the
Royal Court Theatre, got his breakthrough in the television series of
Malcolm Bradbury's History Man. That led him to the Royal Shakespeare
Company (RSC), eventually playing Richard III at Stratford-upon-Avon. His
was an astonishing interpretation: a malevolent spider on crutches.
The RSC connection remains strong: not least because in 2005 Sher and Greg
Doran, the company's chief associate director, became one of the first
couples in Britain to enter a same-sex civil partnership. He and Doran
collaborated on Macbeth, another of Sher's monsters to receive rave reviews.
Why so many evil characters? “Baddies are always better parts than goodies,”
he says with relish. “It is very cathartic because you get all that shit and
badness and anger and stuff out of you on stage. It's much harder playing
someone like Primo Levi and living the horror.
“You can think about what it's like to die in Auschwitz, but what about how
it's actually like to live there? That's what Levi describes in such detail.
After the last performance of Primo, this weight came off me . . . I felt,
and I don't want this to sound flippant, that I did not have to go back to
Auschwitz any more.”
Going “back” is more than just a psychological move. While Sher performed
Primo on a bare stage, the BBC Two drama rebuilt Auschwitz in a disused
factory outside Glasgow. “There is an ongoing debate about whether you can
describe or film Auschwitz, and we are all too well fed and healthy
nowadays. That's why I did Primo as a comfortable-looking man, years after
the war, sitting in a bare room,” he says. “When this new play came along I
thought that it was so important that you can't do it in abstract. So we
just have to accept the convention that we look too well fed and healthy.”
“I can still have intoxicants like wine”
He does look hale and unharrowed. Much of this must be down to his spending
two months submersed in his chosen therapy: painting. “I'm working on a
wonderful project,” he says. “It is a big, big painting that is too big for
my studio in London. I've been allowed the use of the art room at King
Edward VI school, where Shakespeare went, during the school holidays. It's a
giant version of the Sgt Pepper album cover, featuring people who have been
important in my life. Hitler's there, so is Mandela, and so is my family,
all seated together in a big stream-of-consciousness mix.” Who is Hitler
sitting with? “Oh, he's got a lot of empty chairs around him. No one wanted
to be seated next to him.”
Portraits are Sher's main subject, though nor-mally he paints just one at a
time. He exhibits rarely, but has illustrated book jackets for the novels
and non-fiction he has written. “I don't know what's going to happen to the
big painting,” he says. “It just feels important to do. It goes back to the
art therapy that I've done for years. In therapy sessions you draw whatever
comes to mind, then you and the therapist discuss it. It's been good for me.
It brings out the things that are beyond words.”
Sher has been in various sorts of therapy over the past 25 years. Why did he
start? “It's difficult,” he says. “The art therapy came from when I was in a
clinic for cocaine dependency ten years ago. I've stayed with that
therapist. The dangerous thing about cocaine is that it cuts out your
self-censorship. I have always been very self-critical, but cocaine frees
you, which is why everyone on coke ends up just jabbering on at parties. My
God, I'm glad to be free of it. I don't have to stay totally sober, though.
I can still have intoxicants like wine. My biggest addiction is work. I'm a
real workaholic.”
In fact, despite being 59, “a terrifying precipice”, as he calls it, Sher still
isn't sure that the stage is completely his thing. “I have fantasies about
dropping acting for painting all the time,” he says. “The nice thing about
acting, writing and painting is that if you get pissed off with one, you can
show your anger to the one that's betraying you and pick up another.”
His age has at least inspired him to attempt to keep fit. “We live right on
the river, so we get up in the morning and go on these long walks,” he says.
“It's a wonderful thing to watch the seasons gently change.” Healthy food
doesn't quite get the same priority, though, he adds. “When we're both
working like this, we tend to eat Marks & Sparks pre-prepared stuff.”
Despite his dilettantish fantasies, Sher is committed to a return to acting
soon. In November he will make a research trip to South Africa in
preparation for staging The Tempest. “The idea of an African setting is to
use African ritual and magic,” he says. “First we do it in Cape Town and
then we bring it to the UK. I am going to meet some sangomas [traditional
healers], and look at some of the rituals and ceremonies that we can
incorporate into the play.”
Sher will be playing Prospero, the omnipotent magician who many commentators
consider to be Shakespeare's representation of God. It seems an appropriate
next step. From putting a deity in the dock, to organising all the people in
his world into an epic painting, and thence to playing a troublesome deity
himself - Sher seems in no danger of running out of the immense, dark roles
he so desires.
God on Trial, Wednesday, September 3, 9pm, BBC Two
