Heavens Net Is Wide Signed Edition

by Liam Hearn

Anthony Sher’s enthralling account of the struggle—and the triumph – of bringing Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir to the stage. Sher tells how he first came across Levi’s book, of how he conceived the notion of adapting it, of the long-drawn-out negotiations, research trips to Auschwitz and of the struggle to stage his adaptation and remain true to Levi’s precepts. A critical success in both London’s West End and on Broadway.

Genres: Theatre

Hardcover

First published March 15, 2006

Reviews

[Matthew Wyatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating insight into the rehearsal and preparation of one of our greatest classical actors as he embarks on a particularly poignant one man show (based on the memoir of holocaust survivor, Primo Levi). All of Sher's books/theatre diaries are gripping from start to finish and this one certainly did not disappoint.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

To my great pleasure and surprise, this is my new favorite Sher memoir. It's the perfect combination of the Year of the King Sher and the later Sher of the Falstaff and Lear memoirs. He's not as self-centered and neurotic as newly minted star 1980s Sher, and he's gained much of the wisdom and self-knowledge of the later Sher, without that older man's homebody provincialism.

We have here a middle-aged luvvie of fascinating contrasts: he has quite a reputation in the theater world, yet still gets stage fright and struggles to find an audience now and then. He's good-looking in a carefree, unfussy, Semitic way, yet is still prone to bouts of such intense self-scrutiny that he's even once moved to an act of bulimia. He's given legendary performances of Shakespeare's heroes and villains, yet seems to have spent most of the late-90s and early-00s playing characters like a comedy Hitler in a Christian Slater vanity project, agoraphobic maniac Gerald Ballantyne in an edgy TV film of a J.G. Ballard story, and the obscure South African criminal Demetrios Tsafendas in a historical play of Sher's own writ. 55 year-old Tony Sher is a continuously unraveling ribbon: wise, experienced, and beloved, yet also impatient, hesitant, and desperately desirous of attention and love.

Shakespeare is barely mentioned in this memoir. There's a lot of talk of sad, lost men instead. Criminals, prisoners, murderers, maniacs, and persecutors and persecuted, real and imagined. Sher plays them all. The comforting blanket of Shakespeare has been cast aside for this book. The alternative material is much trickier, and it's hard to imagine today's, more bourgeois Sher, with his hit parade of Falstaff and Willy Loman and Lear, diving into material that's as playful with the limits of taste and as vulnerable to artistic failure as his 1997 - 2004 streak of deep, dark, tetchy, and existential roles.

If This Is a Man was too important a work to dash off between TV gigs, and Sher knew it. It was a book too haunting, too dire, and too relevant to his own truant Judaism. It's this book's premise that playing Primo Levi in an adaption of If This is a Man is just more important and serious than playing Macbeth, Iago, Lear, etc. More than. Full stop. And dammit if it doesn't make its case well; countless men have played Macbeth. Very few have played Primo Levi. The historical figures upon whom Macbeth was based have been dead for centuries, if they were ever anything more than myth to begin with. Primo Levi's children are still living; they loved him well, and remember well having to look upon the Nazi tattoo scrawled across his left arm, those numerical marks which memorialize the time when their father learned new meanings of pain, hunger, and loneliness.

Acting is a populist art form. It sometimes aspires towards being a high art, yet it seldom is. If it can be, it is because conditions like the those described in this book are met.

[J.F. Duncan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where do I start? This is Antony Sher (one of my very favourite actors) writing about playing Primo Levi (one of my very favourite writers)in his one man stage show, the film of which can be found on Amazon Prime. Like all Sher's books about his acting life, it is unflinchingly honest, funny, moving and at times very profound. However, the fact that he is playing a real person rather than a Shakespeare character here adds an entirely new perspective to his craft and I appreciated the film all the more for having read about how it was created.

[Catherine Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Antony Sher's writing so it will come as no surprise that I really enjoyed this book. He makes no attempts to gloss over the difficult parts of the creative process which I appreciated. The book is written with so much respect and care which is also great to see.