Taking up a role as guide through hell on Earth

When Antony Sher gets into Primo Levi’s skin, it’s at a very particular time in the Italian writer’s life: 1945, the year Levi was a prisoner at Auschwitz. That experience, graphically depicted in the first volume of Levi’s memoirs, is the basis for “Primo,” the one-person show Sher wrote and stars in on Broadway after hit productions in London.

Levi was 24 when he was captured and shipped to the concentration camp in Poland. Sher, one of Britain’s knighted actors, is 56 but plays Levi as a rather matter-of-fact, gray-haired man looking back -- not as the forlorn, emaciated Nazi prisoner described in the famous memoir, which ends with the camp’s liberation.

“On two occasions I’ve played an inmate of a concentration camp in full striped uniform, shaved head; I’ve even lost weight,” Sher said, mentioning “Singer,” a 1989 Royal Shakespeare Company production, and the 1993 TV movie “Genghis Cohn.”

“But something felt wrong about that,” he continued. “There’s something about me as a free, well-fed man having a comfortable life climbing into costume and pretending to be a skeleton starving to death....”

The image stops him, although he knows that the two Primos, young and old, are forever linked by the number 174517 tattooed on Levi’s left forearm and by the internal demons that led Levi to commit suicide in 1987 at age 67.

The South African-born Sher first read Levi’s 1947 memoir, “If This Is a Man” (published in the United States as “Survival in Auschwitz”), while he researched his “Singer” character.

Sitting in the lobby of the Music Box Theatre, where “Primo” officially opens today, Sher recalled the sensation: “Levi takes the reader by the hand and says, ‘Come, I’m going to guide you around hell.’ And he does. The details are astonishing. He has a great ability to make one feel what it would have been like in that terrible place.”

Levi, for example, writes about the ill-fitting wood-soled shoes issued to inmates that often caused sores and infections. “We all know what it’s like to have shoes that pinch. An ordinary problem becomes a life-or-death situation.”

Serving as a guide has also been Sher’s mission. He prefers to call the script an abridgment rather than an adaptation, “because I’ve been very faithful to his words.” He even greets theatergoers with Levi’s chilling opening sentence: “It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944.”

As its sole actor, Sher has found “Primo” a grueling experience. “I’ve done many classic Shakespearean roles which can be physically, vocally and emotionally punishing, like a marathon. But none can touch the experience of doing this,” said Sher, whose short haircut and neatly trimmed beard resemble those of Levi in his later years, documented in photographs in his native city of Turin in northern Italy, where he returned after Auschwitz.

Sher and director Richard Wilson studied a filmed interview with Levi made in English a few years before his death, but the intention was never to mimic the writer -- “no Italian accent, no mannerisms,” Sher said.

The pair was impressed by the “curious composure” of Holocaust survivors as evidenced in documentaries. “They kept this huge experience inside.”

Sher, known as a highly physical, emotionally expressive actor who’d originally intended to have someone else perform the work, thus became convinced that “too much acting would get in the way of the truth of what I have to talk about.” He credits the play’s success to Wilson, a relatively minimalist director.

Wilson said they quickly realized Levi was “a very humble man, very quiet, undemonstrative. It’s his words that are so powerful.” Asked if he could see someone else in the role, the director replied, “No, no, no!”

The Levi estate was initially reluctant to give permission for Sher even to write “Primo” and stipulated that it could be performed only by Sher and only on stage.

So although there has been keen interest in other productions of “Primo,” this summer’s run in New York may be its last. “I don’t want to sound precious about it, but it is quite difficult to do again and again,” said Sher, who has done the show twice in London as well as in Cape Town, South Africa, his first performance there since leaving in 1968.

Sher is working on other projects -- a screenplay for his novel “Cheap Lives” and a new play commissioned by the RSC that he’s “too shy” to talk about. In September, he plans to direct for the first time. “I want to see why so few directors do it well,” he said with a sly smile.

One of Great Britain’s most distinguished and busiest actors -- he’s won two Olivier Awards and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2000 -- Sher has appeared in New York only once before, in “Stanley” in 1997. “I mostly do those big classical plays, huge, incredibly expensive to produce,” he offered as a reason. In several, he has been directed by his longtime partner, Greg Doran -- whom, he exempted, along with Wilson, from his observation about directors.

The author of several novels, screenplays, an autobiography and the 2003 play “I.D.,” Sher terms himself a “compulsive diarist.” Excerpts from his personal journal during the preparation of “Primo” were recently published as “Primo Time.” The book is a blend of irony -- while he worked on “Primo,” he also played Hitler in the film “Churchill: The Hollywood Years” -- exasperation, theater insights and humor, and Sher wants to update it after the final curtain. He began writing “Primo” partly as an exercise to deal with his stage fright -- “The Fear,” he terms this -- which began when he was in recovery from cocaine addiction in 1996. “Obviously, a one-man show is the best cure if you’ve got stage fright,” Sher said. “It’s either kill or cure; there’s no middle ground.” Smiling, he reenforced his phobia-free state with a sharp rap on a nearby wooden table.