Reinventing Shakespeare: Antony Sher on the craft of acting
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Sir Antony Sher died last month. He was one of the great actors of his generation, one of the stars of the RSC for almost forty years. He played many of the great Shakespearean roles, from the Fool in King Lear, Richard III and Shylock in the 1980s to Titus Andronicus and Macbeth in the 1990s and, more recently, Prospero, Falstaff and Lear himself.
But there was more to Sher’s career than Shakespeare and the RSC. He also starred in some of the best contemporary plays of our time. He started out in plays by Willy Russell, David Hare, Stephen Poliakoff and Mike Leigh in the 1970s, was awarded an Olivier Award for his performance as Arnold in Torch Song Trilogy in the West End in 1985 and gave outstanding performances in the 1990s as Peter Flannery’ s Singer (1990), Henry Carr in Stoppard ’s Travesties (1993) and the artist Stanley Spencer in Stanley by Pam Gems (1997, winning another Oliver Award). Some of his last acclaimed performances were as Phillip Gellburg in Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass (2011), Freud in Terry Johnson’s Hysteria (2013), Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (2015) and Nicolas in Pinter ’s One for the Road (2018).
Sher was also a fine screen actor: Howard Kirk in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1981), Genghis Cohn (1993), Akiba, an Auschwitz inmate in God on Trial (2008), Peter Glickman, a gangster on the run in Hugo Blick’s brilliant series, The Shadow Line (2011) and Disraeli in Mrs. Brown (1997). Interestingly, all, except for Kirk, were Jewish characters.
Sher was not just an outstanding actor. Few actors wrote as well about the craft of acting as he did. He was a fine writer. He wrote four novels, including Middlepost, and a one-man play about Primo Levi, nominated for two awards. But perhaps his most interesting books are about playing some of the great Shakespearean roles, which brought together his many talents as an artist, a writer and as an actor.
The best was Year of the King (1985), his account of his acclaimed performance as Richard III in the famous RSC production. What is so interesting about the book, and about his acclaimed performance, is how he tries to take on a role defined for thirty years by Olivier’s famous performance. How do you take on a role, even reinvent a role, defined by the greatest post-war actor? Early on, Sher describes when the director, Bill Alexander, suggests the two of them watch the Olivier film together. “I tell him,” Sher writes, “that I have already seen the film far too many times and that I would no sooner see it again at this point in my life than play the part in a black page-boy wig, long false nose and thin clipped voice.” A few pages later, Sher writes, “Again that giant shadow falls across the landscape and I dart around trying to find some light of my own.”
I can’t think of a better account by an actor of trying to reinvent a part, defined for years by one of the most famous performances of the post-war period. Later, he meets Kenneth Branagh. “We share a common problem,” Sher writes, “— living in the shadow of Olivier’s films, Henry V and Richard III .” Of course, they’re not just any Shakespearean films. Olivier’s performances completely defined those roles in a way his film of Hamlet or his TV performance as Shylock never did.
Throughout the book, Sher describes trying to find new ways of playing Richard. How crippled should he be? How should he walk? How can Sher create a Richard who is both handicapped and terrifyingly mobile, moving across the stage with astonishing speed? He immerses himself in research, watching Steven Dwoskin’ s autobiographical film Outside In, to get a sense of the sexual fantasies of a disabled man, researching different kinds of deformity while at the same time devising a safe way of playing it, when Richard has to be onstage for most of the production.
Perhaps most interesting of all is how Sher works together with designers and the costume team, working out what kind of crutches Richard could use, what kind of hump could he wear that is not too heavy, slowing him down on stage, giving him pain during a long run.
His later books are less interesting, less ambitious. Woza Shakespeare! (1996), co-written with his partner and director, Gregory Doran, is about a production of Titus Andronicus, put on in Sher’s native South Africa, just after the end of apartheid. Year of the Fat Knight: The Falstaff Diaries (2015) lacks the energy and interest of his account of playing Richard III. They also lack the tension of the first book, the sense of having to overcome Olivier.
It is interesting that his book on Falstaff makes no reference to Robert Stephen’s brilliant performance as Falstaff in Branagh’s Henry V or Richard Eyre ’s superb, star-studded Henry IV, Parts I and II for the BBC’s The Hollow Crown, with Jeremy Irons, Simon Russell Beale, Tom Hiddleston and Julie Walters. Sher must have been aware that the RSC production in which he played Falstaff was lightweight by comparison and would, like Branagh’s film, survive on film.
This brings us to another shadow in these last two memoirs. On several occasions he mentions failing to land big film parts. It eats him away. Sher was an outstanding stage actor but, with a few exceptions, rarely made it on the small or large screen. In Year of the King he acknowledges that this is the reason why Olivier casts such a shadow. His most famous performances live on, but on the big screen. Sher’s electrifying stage performances live on in our memories but it’s hard to find them on You Tube or on DVD. To understand what made Sir Antony such a great actor, it’s worth turning to Year of the King.
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