From http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/body_and_soul/article4632628.ece
August 30, 2008
The art of darkness: Sir Antony Sher
The acclaimed actor discusses his harrowing new role in the TV drama God on Trial, battling drugs and why art is the best therapy of all
John Naish
“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.
“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.”
God on Trial, Wednesday, September 3, 9pm, BBC Two
No comments:
Post a Comment