What does it take to persuade an actor to play the same part three times in the space of one year? Matthew Amer found out by talking to Sir Antony Sher.
It is, it turns out, very simple indeed. “Philip Gellburg is a very complex character, endlessly fascinating,” Sher explains. “So I didn’t need any persuading. There are some parts that you find as an actor, that you feel so fascinated by the character, you can endlessly mine it for more and more riches. It just keeps yielding.”
Gellburg is the male half of a troubled marriage in Arthur Miller’s late play Broken Glass, in which Sher is currently starring opposite The Body Farm’s Tara Fitzgerald at the Vaudeville theatre. A Jewish couple living in New York, reading about Kristallnacht traumatises Philip’s wife Sylvia (Fitzgerald) to the point that they seek medical help. As Sylvia’s problems are explored, deep-rooted issues with the couple’s relationship begin to surface.
Though Broken Glass doesn’t leap to the mind when thinking of American playwright Miller, not like Death Of A Salesman or The Crucible anyway, “It’s really a very fine play,” Sher tells me. “It’s not one of Arthur Miller’s most well known plays, but I think it will become seen as such.”
For a performer of Sher’s quality to return to it not once, but twice, there must be something about it. The native South African, who moved to England in 1958, is one of the country’s most respected stage performers and could probably walk into any cast in the country as easily as I could walk into McDonalds. His CV includes work with Mike Leigh, seasons at the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, West End runs and two Olivier Awards for Best Actor, winning in 1985 for Richard III and 1997 for Stanley.
Certainly part of the lure of this reoccurring role is due to Gellburg suffering from an affliction to which Sher can relate. More than that, an affliction with which Sher is personally acquainted. “Philip Gellburg,” Sher explains, “has a huge identity crisis.”
As a younger man, newly arrived on strange shores, Sher was riddled with insecurity about his own identity. When I previously spoke to him in 2003, as he was promoting his first play as a playwright, tellingly titled ID, he told me that: “As a gay, Jewish, white South African I belong to quite a lot of minority groups. If you are part of those minority groups you constantly have to question who you are, what you are, whether you have the courage to be who you are, because they’re not always popular things. I certainly went through a long struggle in the early years in this country just to be who I am.”
It was therapy that helped Sher to work through his issues and accept every part of who he is. “Philip Gellburg,” he continues, “unfortunately, would never dream of going to a therapist, so is stuck in a terrible mess within himself because you can’t not be who you are. That’s a lesson I’ve learned and that Philip hasn’t learned. It’s a tremendous waste of time and energy to dislike who you are. It really is a completely pointless exercise.”
Part of his technique for dealing with these thorny issues of self was to use art as therapy. It was a return to a part of his life that could, at one point, have been his career. Instead he chose to pursue performing, but in recent years the paintbrush has grown in importance.
“It’s a tremendous waste of time and energy to dislike who you are”
The actor has recently had his work exhibited at the National Theatre, at the Crucible, Sheffield and at the Herbert Gallery in Coventry and, though writing seemed to be dominating his spare time at the turn of the century, it is now painting that helps him relax.
Though he doesn’t regret not pursuing visual art as a career, there is a reticence associated with not studying it when he had the opportunity. It wouldn’t have taught him about art, he argues, but it would have taught him about technique. In that respect, it is, he thinks, similar to drama school. “It doesn’t really teach you to act; you can either act or you can’t, that’s a very inner thing. I think that’s also true of art. You can either paint and draw or you can’t, but learning technique is terrifically useful.”
He doesn’t seem to have suffered for a lack of formal training, nor has it dampened his ambition. The centrepiece for those exhibitions, titled The Audience, featured around 150 characters: “An audience of some of the people who’ve been very influential in my life”. Among the faces on display, along with friends and family, were Nelson Mandela and Hitler. “I took a year out of acting a couple of years ago to do it.”
More usually, Sher paints a self-portrait every time he finishes in a production. Possibly self-portrait is the wrong term. It is, in fact, a picture of Sher playing that character. “That fascinates me,” Sher tells me, “how the actor and the character relates and how I look through the character as it were.”
That really shouldn’t be at all surprising. It’s all about identity. Sher. The character. Where they meet. Where they differ. I wonder if Sher’s anxieties come through in the faces of his painted character. I wonder if he will end up painting three portraits of Philip Gellburg; one of his first performance opposite Lucy Cohu and Nigel Lindsay at the Tricycle theatre in 2010, one of his performance in the South African production directed by his friend Janice Honeyman in his home city of Cape Town, and one of his performance alongside Fitzgerald and Stanley Townsend at the Vaudeville theatre. Each production, he assures me, has led to him giving a different performance, the other actors drawing varied reactions from his ever-present role as Philip. I’d love to see all three side by side as a snapshot of his growth in the character.
What’s most surprising, to me, is that Sher no longer holds on to these paintings. He used to, but after the exhibitions he discovered how “liberating” it was to sell them. What would a psychiatrist say about painting a version of yourself after every production then removing it entirely from your life, I wonder?
We chat as Sher is in the process of transferring Broken Glass from its pre-West End run at Kilburn’s Tricycle theatre to the Vaudeville theatre, at a point where he is being very secretive about a new project that might or might not happen. News has since broken that he will return to the National Theatre in 2012 and 2013 to star in Nicholas Wright’s new play Travelling Light and a revival of the satire The Captain Of Köpenick. The first finds him exploring the life of an immigrant, the second a convict pretending to be someone else.
Maybe it’s too easy to spot the connections between actor and character, particularly when you are pondering the ideas of identity. Maybe not. But two new portraits reflecting both Sher and his work will undoubtedly make interesting viewing.
MA