Sir Antony Sher struggled to bring Primo Levi's story to stage
Source: Sun-Sentinel.com (Original Article)
Sir Antony Sher struggled to bring Primo Levi’s story to stage
By SARAH LYALL |
The New York Times
April 20, 2008
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The difficulties in writing and performing Primo, Sir Antony Sher’s one-man play about the author and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, seemed at first insurmountable.
There was the skepticism of the Levi estate, which had a policy of saying no. There was Sir Antony’s conviction that Auschwitz could not be portrayed onstage or in film in any traditional way. And there was the problem of the ending: how to reflect Levi’s brave, reassuring decision to embrace life after the Holocaust while also acknowledging the tragedy of his apparent suicide decades later.
Sir Antony finally decided to leave out the manner of Levi’s death, restricting the play to Auschwitz as Levi remembered it in If This Is a Man, his postwar memoir. Primo, which won raves at London’s National Theatre in 2004 before transferring to Broadway in the summer of 2005, ends with the liberation of the camp by the Russian Army on Jan. 27, 1945.
“Levi lived an amazingly full life,” Sir Antony said. “In the end, his book and my piece are entirely about survival.”
Primo, which comes to the small screen Thursday as part of the PBS series Great Performances, was “probably harder to do than anything else I’ve done or anything else I will ever do,” he said.
Best known as a movie and stage actor — he has performed ANZ Frequent Flyer with the Royal Shakespeare Company for …continue reading