Stage fright

The taxi reaches South Africa House. I often had to report here when I first came to London from Cape Town in 1968. It was a grim and ugly place then, a symbol of the old regime. Nowadays I come here to party. Today’s will celebrate the tenth anniversary of the publication of Mandela’s Long Walk To Freedom. My partner Greg (Doran, RSC associate director) and I are among the lucky ones invited along.

Mandela talks for about half an hour without notes. His stories have surprising details — very human, very Primo Levi — like how nervous he felt when, on a secret visit from prison in 1989, he had his first meeting with President FW de Klerk: “He came striding out of a door which I took to be an office, but which, when I became president myself, I learnt was a loo.”

November 7: Grayshott Hall Health Farm. Been here for five days with Richard (Wilson, actor and director), indulging ourselves. In between all the treatments, saunas and massages, Richard and I have taken long walks. During these expeditions I’ve felt rather relieved that One Foot In The Grave is no longer on; at the height of its popularity you couldn’t go anywhere with Richard without people staring, waving, stopping to chat. Richard and I have been best friends for 30 years, and although his new superstar fame was a wonderful thing, I never got used to sharing his company with the rest of the nation.

Today the weather turned grey and wet and we were confined to quarters. I found myself staring out at the drizzle, doing some stocktaking. Both my careers, acting and writing, feel as though they’re in some trouble at the moment. The Jacobethans have been remarkably successful — five unknown classical pieces won rave reviews and played to packed houses — and I’ve felt proud of my own contribution as Domitian Caesar in The Roman Actor and the title role in The Malcontent. But at the same time I’ve been nursing a secret problem. Stage fright. This first started while I was in recovery from cocaine addiction in 1996, but it seems to be getting steadily worse now.

During the Jacobethans, this thing that I’ve dubbed The Fear has been quite merciless. Practically every performance is done to the accompaniment of three babbling voices: the first is my own, speaking the lines, the second is an inner demon telling me I'm going to f*** up, and the third is an inner angel telling the demon to f*** off. At times it’s intolerable. I’m seriously thinking about giving up acting — theatre acting. Maybe doing an occasional film or TV, but mainly writing full-time.

The big question is this: if you’re currently suffering from chronic stage fright, is it a good idea to write yourself a one-man show?

November 8: I woke up this morning and the opening line of Primo Levi’s book was going round and round in my head: “It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944 . . .” He goes on to explain that there was a shortage of labour by then so the Nazis extended the average lifespan of the prisoners. But the first line grabs the reader straight away. It would have the same effect on an audience. What a way to start.

November 11: Been writing non-stop for days now, from about 4am to 9pm. I’m in a kind of fever.

November 12: Two big biographies of Levi came out earlier this year, by Carole Angier and Ian Thomson. It’s been a surprise to learn that Primo Levi, widely regarded as a great Jewish figure, was non-practising and non-believing. There’s a striking moment at the beginning of If This Is a Man, when, as a member of a small partisan band, he’s arrested by the Italian fascist militia and interrogated. He has to choose between declaring his political beliefs and his Jewish race. He thinks it’s safer to identify himself as Jewish! Being a secular Jew myself, I feel even more intrigued by him than before.

November 14: Writing, writing, writing. Paring down the words, it becomes a Beckett-like monologue. I’m writing practically no stage directions; just occasionally “he stands, he sits”. Richard (Wilson) would be the perfect director. One of his favourite words is minimalism.

November 15: Well I’ve sort of finished. My exquisite fever has lasted exactly a week, raging around the clock. The ending is still a worry. At the moment I’m having the actor come out of character and tell us about Levi’s shocking death in 1987 — falling down the stairwell of his apartment block in Turin. Was it suicide? (He was a depressive all his life.) Was it an accident? (He was under heavy medication and may have fainted.) Was it murder? (By neo-Nazis.)

November 16: Any new piece of writing always goes straight to Greg for his opinion. But when I asked him to look at this first rough draft, he suggested that I read it aloud to him instead: “It’s written for one voice, so let me hear it like that.” The reading was not good. I couldn’t get through certain sections without crying. This was both absurd and wrong. The one thing Primo never does is cry. At the end, when I finally looked up at Greg, his face was also wet with tears. “We’re just a pair of sentimental old poofs,” he said, breaking into laughter.

November 19: It was only afterwards I remembered I don’t have the rights to If This Is a Man. Mic Cheetham, my literary agent, is going to try applying for them from the Primo Levi estate, which is made up of his widow Lucia and his two grown-up children Lisa and Renzo. Apparently you try through Levi’s publisher, Einaudi, in Turin.

November 20: Richard rings, having read the script. He’s not a man known for idle praise, so it’s a nice surprise to hear him say: “It’s wonderful.” I say: “Let’s just talk about casting for a moment — I want to avoid doing this myself . . .” Richard does one of his stern silences, then says: “What?! But you have to do it yourself. Of course you do. Don’t be stupid.”

November 24: Tomorrow we start rehearsals for the Jacobethans in London. Will that mean a return of The Fear as well? In the afternoon I rang Mom in Cape Town. I asked about the weather. She said: “It’s very hot, which is odd, given it’s our winter.” I frowned — it’s summer there — but said nothing. Told her we were counting the days to our Christmas holiday with them, and an escape from the grey skies here. She said: “Oh, that ’s odd, given it’s your summer.” My siblings are increasingly worried about Mom. They say it’s more than just old age.

December 10: Mom met us at the airport. In the same way that children can shoot up if you don’t see them for a while, old people can shrink, deflate and in a way vanish. Oddly enough, the illness — it’s now diagnosed as Alzheimer’s — is making her gentler, more affectionate, more tactile. The all-knowing, all-controlling Jewish Mother has gone for ever.

There’s an uncensored side now. Over lunch in Camps Bay’s fish restaurant, Blues, she was talking about Dad and how she misses him more and more. This came as a surprise to me; they weren’t natural soulmates and had a combative relationship. Forgetting my rule about not asking questions I said, “When d’you think you were happiest?” She looked blank for a moment then answered, “In bed.”

Greg, who was about to pop a prawn in his mouth, froze in astonishment. Blushing, I said, “What?” She said, “Yes, he was very good in bed.” Greg’s prawn flew across the room.

A week of mixed emotions, topped by a fax from Mic: the Primo Levi estate don’t give permission.

January 15, 2003: Richard is completely unfazed by our rejection. He’s sure we can apply again if we can just get some heavyweight backing: ie, a theatre that wants to produce it. Richard launches into a discussion about how we might rehearse it. Says that to even remotely touch Levi’s experience in the camp we need to do some exercises which involve humiliation. He keeps saying this word “humiliation”. Since Richard is my sternest critic (I have to brace myself whenever he comes to my shows), I eventually interrupt and say: “But Richard, why would I need humiliation exercises when I’ve asked you to direct?”

March 7: While a question mark hangs over whether I’ll be allowed to play someone who survived the Holocaust, I’ve now been asked to play the man who unleashed it. Hitler. It’s a film, a dark comedy called Churchill: the Hollywood Years.

Jack Bradley of the National Theatre is very gung-ho about Primo. He and Nick Hytner, the National’s artistic director, will draft a letter to the Levi family expressing their passionate interest in the project.

March 9: In my weekly phone call to Mom this evening, she said, as she now says regularly, the same two things: “Oh, how lovely to hear your voice!” and “So — still no work?” The latter is a puzzle. I guess the precise moment when this illness took hold must have coincided with the awful period of unemployment I had in 2001. So that’s stuck in her mind now. She thinks she’s the mother of an out-of-work actor. She who was so ambitious for me, who revelled in whatever I achieved, now laments my failure.

March 24: Devon. Filming Churchill.

March 27: Ralph Richardson said that stage acting is the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing. Well, I’d add that film acting is the art of keeping yourself from going completely nuts with boredom. Today my pick-up time at the hotel was 6.30am and I got back at 9.30pm, having spent 13 hours waiting with only two on set. And I never got to say my one line of dialogue!

And of course once you’re made-up and costumed as Hitler, your freedom of movement becomes rather restricted. There’s no popping into the local Waterstone’s. So I confine myself to my trailer, drifting in and out of dull, sluggish sleep. Waking this afternoon I had no idea where I was. I struggled off the bed and suddenly found myself face to face with Hitler. I screamed out loud. For a Jew to wake from sleep, look in a mirror and see Hitler looking back is a shock of existential proportions. At least I had a soulmate today: the actor David Schneider playing Goebbels. When we met we said almost in unison: “What are two nice Jewish guys doing in a job like this?”

We walked together to the set, turned a corner and both stopped dead. In front of us were 30 uniformed stormtroopers — the young local extras carefully selected for their chiselled, blond, Aryan looks. David said in a hushed voice: “As a little boy I had nightmares like this.” I sighed: “As a big boy I’ve had fantasies like this.”

July 10: Mic rings through with incredible news. The Primo Levi estate has said yes.

November 25: Stratford. Greg’s here to open All’s Well that Ends Well with Judi Dench, and I’ve got two tasks: to learn Iago for an RSC production of Othello and to do a new draft of Primo. The first task is a new ending. The story needs to end simply with the liberation of the camp.

Evening. Dirty Duck. A welcome party for All’s Well. Judi buys champagne for the whole company, plus hangers-on like me. Her last time here was in 1979. I ask her what it is like to be back. “Strange,” she says. “Nice strange?” “Everything,” she says simply. I don’t need to ask more. This is where she and Michael Williams met, lived and worked together, and he’s buried just a few miles away. Michael’s presence is so powerful it’s as though he’s sitting next to her in the window table.

December 14: Grayshott Hall health farm. In between sauna and gym, I learnt lines and wrote and was fast asleep when the fire bell went off. A false alarm luckily.

December 15: Richard arrived late last night just at the time of the fire alarm but couldn’t hear it from the car park. As he headed towards the lobby, a lot of guests in white gowns came running out. He wondered if Grayshott had instituted a new regime of midnight exercises.

February 19, 2004: It’s the morning after the press night of Othello. I wasn’t at all frightened beforehand, had a good feeling, a sense I’d fly. Well, I didn’t. I can’t believe I was so feeble, so nervous. It really does seem that The Fear is settling in now, taking up residence. I picture my demon as a hyena. The thing has its head in my guts now, and I don’t know what to do. The one thing I mustn’t do is a solo show.

July 22: Othello finally finished last Saturday night. Publicly it was a success. But privately I’ve gone through a rough time. My battle with The Fear grew worse than I could’ve imagined. Again and again I came very, very close to doing what I called “an Ian Holm” — walking offstage and huddling on the floor of my dressing room. (Holm did this during the final preview of the 1976 RSC Iceman Cometh.) But I somehow didn’t. I knew that if I did, I’d never come back. (Which Holm has done, triumphantly.)

I was helped by my therapist, Marietta Young, whom I’ve continued to see weekly ever since I left the clinic for cocaine dependency in 1996. I do art therapy with her. I drew an image of The Fear as a nightmarish hyena and showed it slinking away. The start date of Primo draws closer: the workshop is just two weeks away.

July 27: Had a good long talk with Richard on the phone. I was struck by a different tone in his voice, something I’ve never heard before in all our years of friendship, something difficult to describe . . . a particular mixture of kindness and strength. He said he was going to help me reach so far inside the character that it won’t be a question of acting but being.

A fresh side of Richard is coming into focus. Him as a director. As a friend he’s exceptionally generous, and very funny of course, but there’s always something severe too, an austerity, a Calvinist streak — his Scottishness, I suppose. Added to that he lives alone and has no partner. Perhaps as a director he feels more complete: now he has a family, people who rely on him, and whom he leads. Today there was a new gentleness in him which surprised and touched me.

July 28: Greg and I are among the guests at a three-day house party at Sandringham hosted by Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. We were apprehensive. Turns out all the other guests felt the same. On the first evening — yesterday — I passed Jeremy Paxman in a corridor and he said, “I’ve just had a conversation with Prince Charles — about fishing — and everything I said seemed to echo in my head — I sounded like such an idiot. ”Well, if Jeremy Paxman could sound like an idiot, I knew we were going to be okay.

Nevertheless, it’s a relief that the other guests include a couple of mates — the actress Miriam Margolyes and the playwright Peter Shaffer. Then there’s one of my heroes, the artist David Hockney, also Lady Solti (widow of the conductor), Michael Morpurgo (the children’s laureate), James Howard-Johnston and Angela Huth (the historian and the writer), Leo de Rothschild (of the banking family), Drue Heinz (of the beans empire), and the Earl and Countess of Gowrie.

This morning all of us accompanied Prince Charles and Camilla to the Sandringham Flower Show — all except Hockney, whom I watched crossing the great lawn at the back of the house with watercolour pad and paints. Then we travelled in a convoy of cars to an informal lunch at one of the log cabins dotted round the estate. The meal was described as a picnic, but was rather sumptuous, on a long table in the shade of a tree.

Afterwards, walking back to the main house through sunny fields and dappled woods, with Prince Charles leading, I fell in alongside Neiti Gowrie. She looks my age but is maybe older; trim, with blonde hair, fine features and a sense of grace. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her about Primo.

I grew intrigued by her accent, and asked her about it. “Well, I was born in Germany,” she replied. “I should also explain,” she said in a steady tone, “that my father was in the SS.” I went silent. “His name was Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg. He was Prussian. And part of the group who tried to assassinate Hitler.”

I stopped walking. “The group who planted the bomb?”

“Yes.”

“Under a table . . . in a briefing room . . .”

“At the Wolfsschanze, yes, the Wolf’s Lair . . . well, I’m sure you know what happened.” When the assassination attempt failed, Hitler had the conspirators executed — hanged with piano wire.

Neiti looked composed, willing to talk on. I said: “Your father did something very heroic, but I suppose not if you were in Germany. What was that like?”

“Well, I was only an infant, yet I do have some sense of the moment. And naturally I’ve heard the family stories . . . my mother wrote these down actually . . . just for us . . .” It was summertime, Neiti said, and they were staying in their lakeside home in northern Germany. Her father visited the family two days before the assassination attempt, which would fall on his wife’s birthday. He told her what was going to happen, and they parted tenderly at the railway station. They would never see one another again.

After the event, Neiti’s mother was interrogated by the Gestapo. She claimed complete ignorance of the plot. To try to save her husband’s life she travelled to Berlin to talk to Himmler (whom they knew), but he refused to meet her and the execution went ahead.

I asked: “What year was the assassination attempt?” “44.” “That’s the year Levi is in Auschwitz . . . I wonder if Levi and the others in Auschwitz heard what your father was part of, what he tried to do?”

This evening there’s a formal and very romantic dinner in the garden of Sandringham, under an avenue of lime trees, the long table lit by candles, with night-lights and lanterns in the branches and on the surrounding lawn. Afterwards, Miriam Margolyes volunteers to perform a short section of her one-woman show Dickens’ Women. Relieved that nobody is asking me to perform anything, and emboldened by a glass or two, I say to Prince Charles: “Why don’t you do the Spike Milligan poem you did at that RSC fundraiser at Home House?”

He looks at me with surprise. I think: ah yes, that’s probably not the way you talk to royalty. But then he pops into his study and returns saying: “I haven’t got that with me, but Barry Humphries gave me one of his monologues recently — I’ll do that.” Barry Humphries? Are we going to see Prince Charles as Dame Edna? No. He does a Sandy Stone speech — in a very passable Australian accent and with a sense of comedy that (almost) matches Miriam’s turn as Mr and Mrs Bumble.

© Antony Sher 2005

Extracted from Primo Time by Antony Sher to be published on March 17 by Nick Hern Books at £9.99. Copies can be ordered for £8.49 plus 99p p&p from The Sunday Times Books Direct on 0870 165 8585. Primo is at the Hampstead Theatre, London NW3, from February 23 to March 19

Page 2: Levi, a literary star

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LEVI, A LITERARY STAR BORN OUT OF HORROR

Primo Levi was born in Turin on July 31, 1919. His family was not religious and it was only as a young man that he was forced to realise his Jewishness by Mussolini’s race laws.

He was working as an industrial chemist in 1943 when Turin was occupied by the Germans. He joined the anti-fascist partisans but was captured within months and sent to Auschwitz. Near to death, he managed to pass a chemistry exam set by his captors and moved to an artificial-rubber factory inside the camp. This helped him to survive.

On returning home he worked again as an industrial chemist but also wrote If This Is a Man, which was published in 1947. In it he described — and tried to explain — life in the Nazi death camps, which he called “pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment”. He wrote as an observer rather than as a judge, saying he had “an intense wish to understand”. The Truce, his second book, appeared in 1963. It described his harrowing 10-month journey home in 1945 through post-war eastern Europe. Further books followed and, as his fame spread, his works were translated into many languages.

He died on April 11, 1987, after falling down the stairwell of his apartment block in Turin — an apparent suicide generally blamed on lifelong depression rather than his Auschwitz experiences.