Antony Sher gets personal

By Irving Wardle

Mingling with Shakespeare’s 450th-birthday festivities, the RSC’s summer season kicks off with a centenary tribute to Arthur Miller: Antony Sher in “Death of a Salesman”. Why? My guess is that it has to do with Sher’s 40-year progress as the creator of a gallery of unforgettable figures, among whom he himself for long remained invisible.

In 2001, Sher published an autobiography explaining why, as a South African homosexual Jew, he had sought anonymity. Then came his performance as the assassin of the South African premier Hendrik Verwoerd in his own first play, “I.D.”, and the impenetrable façade began dissolving into a series of highly personal themes, including the paradoxes of persecution and the outsider’s struggle to assimilate. Some roles, such as the displaced Jewish hero of Miller’s “Broken Glass”, became aspects of Sher’s own story; others formed a sequence of disreputable intruders who threaten the status quo, culminating in last year’s Falstaff—with whom another theme appeared, with Falstaff as an alternative parent, and the Hal-Henry IV relationship mirroring Sher’s unfinished business with his difficult father.