The Big Interview: Sir Antony Sher

It is virtually impossible to truly get the measure of a man (or woman) when they are performing to a table full of journalists. But if the subject is someone as seasoned, professional and used to working an audience as, say, Antony Sher, a round table can actually be fun. You can just sit back and watch the performance.

At the National Theatre, minutes after the cast of Travelling Light have taken their final bow, I am with a group of five being taken up to a meeting room high in the South Bank building.

As the lift doors are closing, the sound of someone jogging down the corridor is heard and Sir Antony Sher jumps in.

Short and hefty, he has just spent a couple of hours on stage playing a character who prowls about like a caged animal, physically imposing, the sort of man whose muscles are earned not from a gym, but a lifetime of working in the open air. Here he stands, short, pot-bellied, and entirely human.

It is a remarkable transformation. He is still wearing the impressively large false sideburns he sports as Jakob on stage. He had time to remove the main section of a big, bushy beard. He’ll have the sideburns peeled off after the interview before having a nap and then preparing for the evening performance.

Upstairs in the room, Sher reveals he has that thing that veteran Shakespearean actors have in abundance: gravitas.

The voice is quiet. Preserving it, particularly on a day like today where there are two performances, is important. There is no mistaking, however, the technique and control of the voice on display. Anyone who witnessed Sher’s Prospero in The Tempest at Leeds Grand in 2009 will know what I mean – the diction and clarity of a voice “hitting the back wall” was remarked upon by almost all the reviews at the time.

Even when quiet, the voice is mesmerising. “Ralph Richardson said being in a stage play is like getting on a huge wheel rolling down a big hill and once you’re on it, you can’t get off,” says Sher, his eyes lighting up. “I know what he means.”

Such name-dropping from other actors might sound foolish. Sher gets away with it.

Born in South Africa in 1949, he came to England, like his cousin Ronald Harwood, when he was a teenager. Failing to get into two of the more established London drama schools, he secured a place at the Webber Douglas Academy and in the Seventies found himself in the middle of a creative maelstrom at the Liverpool Everyman where almost all of his contemporaries would go on to make names for themselves – Willy Russell, Alan Bleasdale, Julie Walters, Jonathan Pryce.

In 1984, he landed the role that made his name, Richard III at the RSC, which won him an Olivier award and earned him a place in the pantheon of great stage actors.

Does he prefer film or stage acting? To be fair, the play in which he appears, and which is coming to Leeds this week, Travelling Light, is essentially about movies. So the question (not my own) isn’t as banal as it sounds.

“I don’t do much film, I’m primarily a theatre actor,” he says. “I like doing it when I do because it’s very different from theatre and it’s invigorating. I love watching movies, I grew up watching them because in the South Africa of my youth the theatre wasn’t great, so we all went to the cinema.

“I used to love those Roman epics, like Ben Hur and Spartacus.”

In Travelling Light, written by Nicholas Wright, Sher’s character accidentally becomes one of the first movie producers in the world.

Damien Molony as Motl Mendl is fascinated by the idea of a camera that captures moving images and begins to make movies in the shtetl where he has returned to see his family. Jakob is the local businessman who funds the film.

The stage play, set in a Jewish settlement, is about much more than movies – it is about home and leaving home. “I felt that strongly when I first read it, there are lots of parts of the play that resonate for me about leaving home and it having an irresistible emotional tug,” says Sher.

“At several stages the young man directing the movie is overcome with emotion about leaving home and the fact that he spent his life away from it.

“That rings very true for me every time I go back to South Africa, particularly as I get older it’s more and more meaningful. I left in 1968 and it still has a very powerful pull.” Sher, who had one of the first UK civil partnerships with partner Gregory Doran, associate at the RSC, has often described himself as an outsider everywhere, by virtue of being Jewish, gay and a white South African. All three parts of his identity are vital to his sense of self.

“The shtetl part of the story is my own history. My grandparents came from Eastern Europe, from Lithuania and two of them came from the same shtetl, called Plunge.

“In about 1990, the National Theatre went on a cultural visit to Lithuania and I was invited – part of the reason for me going was because the National said they would get me to Plunge, which they did, supplying a car and a translator.

“Unbelievably I got to go back to this place where my people were from. They would never have believed it. They left as shamed second-class people because they were Jewish, second-class citizens, fearing the pogroms that were in Poland at the time in Lithuania in the 1890s. They would not have believed that one day a Sher would have gone back there out of fascination and interest.

“So it was a very moving experience, the shtetl part of it was very meaningful to me. The other thing that attracted me to the play was the role of Jakob. He was something very different for me and I immediately wanted to do it.

“I don’t normally get to play people like him, with his earthiness and in a way his honesty. I tend to play a lot of psychopaths.”

The gathered crowd find this hilarious and Sher’s impressive smile falls warmly on the room.

“He’s not a psychopath even though he can be quite rough.

“He lives off his emotions, like a wild animal, a feral child and even though he’s tamed, it’s like people who keep lions – they will attack if provoked.”

Alongside his acting, Sher is a painter and writer, with books and plays to his name. For Travelling Light the National laid on a sort of library in the rehearsal room, with books about the Jewish pogroms and the shtetls. He didn’t need to borrow them because he had already done so much research for his own first novel Middlepost, set in a shtetl.

“The National offered me the role of Jakob and at the first read through I loved it. It’s very cheeky – it has a lot of chutzpah. You see the casting couch happening with my demands to a young girl that can play a part as long as she can be a ‘good friend’ to me.

The play comes to Leeds as part of a national tour. Each journalist around the table dutifully asks “do you have a link with (insert city’s name here)...?”

Sher listens politely and comes up with something different for Wales, Manchester, Newcastle. Having presented a masterful performance on the stage downstairs, upstairs he’s delivering a master class on how to work a room. He says he is looking forward to getting on the road.

“If a play is carefully rehearsed it isn’t that different, yet it has to be alive and remain spontaneous. So that’s the trick of theatre acting. It’s balancing keeping what was rehearsed with a feeling of spontaneity.

“In each city you visit, the audience are the citizens of that place, so they inevitably have a different character.

“I really enjoy how different cities react to the same play. I find it reinvigorating that, say, Sheffield audiences are different to London audiences – they are different – a very warm audience.”

The mention of Sheffield is entirely unbidden – I am not one who asks the parochial question. Sher offers it anyway as part of the performance.

A true professional.

Travelling Light, Leeds Grand Theatre, March 20 to 24. On Wednesday, March 21, Nick Ahad will chair a post-show discussion with the cast. Tickets 0844 848 2705.