Beside Myself

An Actor's Life

Antony Sher

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780016344
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literarische Briefe

A remarkably candid autobiography, utterly involving and often startlingly revelatory, Beside Myself is an inspiration to young actors and a treat for seasoned theatregoers.

'I wish I'd read this book when I was starting out. Not only is Antony Sher one of the all-time greats of classical theatre, he also manages to be a writer of enormous skill and insight' David Tennant

Actor, author, artist Antony Sher grew up in the Old South Africa with a profound sense of being an outsider. Small, Jewish and secretly gay, he found refuge in theatre and escaped to London aged just nineteen.

In Beside Myself, Sher takes us to the heart of what it is to be an actor today, describing the journeys he undertakes in order to inhabit the roles for which he is famous - including The History Man (his TV breakthrough), Macbeth, Tamburlaine, Cyrano, Stanley Spencer and Richard III.

This edition, published to mark the author's 60th birthday, includes a new foreword and epilogue.

'the most unsparingly honest actor's autobiography I have ever read' Michael Billington, Guardian

'An extraordinary work of self-exploration' Irish Times

'A human, funny, nakedly direct memoir, beautifully written' Financial Times

'Fascinating... No praise can be too high' Sunday Times

'A masterclass. Any student or young actor could learn a great deal from studying Sher's extraordinarily thorough modus operandi' The Stage

PART I

Now

1

THE BOY

MY FIRST MEMORIES are of shit and love. In that order.

I’m aged about two in the first. It’s night-time. I mess my bed. It fascinates me. I cup an especially shapely turd in my hands and start towards my parents room. My sister, Verne, aged five, intercepts me. She’s horrified. The object in my hands instantly transforms itself. A moment ago it was marvellous – now it’s foul. I have produced something foul. The shock of this never leaves me. It will recur again and again in my life: me bearing forth some seemingly splendid thing, only to bump into a critic.

I’m aged four-and-a-half in the second. I’m sure about that because, as a June baby, I’ve started kindergarten six months early. Another boy in the class is smaller than me, with soft brown eyes and hair. His openness and vulnerability draw me. His maleness too – I’m certain this is part of it. I’m a dark and unlovely shape, I sense this already, while he is completely beautiful. I fall in love. It’s exactly like the adult experience, a drug. In his presence I feel my blood changing and an exquisite substance pumping round my veins. He fills my mind. I carry ecstatic images of him to sleep each night and wake with them each morning. Everything is joyful, everything. I remember us holding one another and wheeling about on the playground. Then something happens, I don’t know what – it’s to do with shame again – something’s wrong, something’s bad and we’re separated. The moment of this is very clear. We’re both getting into our parents’ cars. My view is low down, only four-and-a-half years’ growth above the pavement. There he goes, climbing into the car. I have no further recollection of him. Not of him – though I’ll certainly see his likeness again.

2

THE HOUSE

IT’S JANUARY 2000. A time of big birthdays. The world has just had one and a few months earlier so did I. On the 14th of June last year I turned fifty. I’ve gone through the motions of normal life since then, including rehearsing and opening an RSC Macbeth, which has been a big success, and finishing a new novel, which has been turned down by every publisher in the land, but all in a kind of daze. I’m fifty, I’m fifty, what am I doing, where am I going, blah, blah …

Now I’ve arrived in my homeland, South Africa, with my partner Greg Doran, on a curious double mission. To celebrate another big birthday – my mother’s eightieth – and to bury my father.

Dad actually died six years ago, in November 1993, but we’re only burying him now. It’s a long story – I’ll come back to it.

The drive from Cape Town airport starts with a grim picture of the Old South Africa – mile after mile of townships and squatter camps – then turns into the loveliest journey I know. The road climbs the lower flanks of Table Mountain, crests a rise and then suddenly dips, almost tumbles, like a fairground ride, and now you’re dropping down towards town and the astonishing blue, blue, blue of Sea Point – its sky and sea makes a huge pool of blue into which I fall happily, again and again, falling into memories, falling into childhood, falling home. The Main Road is dotted with Italian restaurants, the Beach Road flats are coloured like cassata ice cream, vanilla, strawberry, peppermint. We drive to the end, we turn into Alexander Road…

This is where I grew up, at number three, and where Mom still lives. She has fetched us from the airport. I lean my head against the car window, frowning, as she drives past the house to the hotel at the top of the road. I knew this would feel strange.

Because this visit is brief and we need some holiday time to ourselves, Greg and I aren’t staying with Mom or Verne as we usually do, but have opted instead for the President Hotel. We have a suite on the fifth floor. Hurrying to the balcony, I find it has a bird’s-eye view of Alexander Road.

The houses are big, square and double-storeyed, built in 1927. Coming up from Beach Road, the first three roofs – a condominium of flats – are a faded charcoal colour, then there’s a silvery aluminium roof and then ours, a terracotta tile, quite a darkish red, clearly showing a white track of seagull droppings along the crest.

Montagu House. The Sher family home.

Mom has a cup of coffee with us in the hotel, then leaves. We’re going to unpack before strolling down. I stand on the balcony watching her drive to the house. From within the car she presses a remote control and the security gates open. My gaze drifts to the house. All the blinds are drawn and the windows shut. Partly to keep out the heat, which Mom can’t abide in her old age, partly to keep out intruders. Cape Town is becoming as dangerous as Joburg, the whites say. There were several bombs recently, while murder, rape and muggings are commonplace. A few months ago a black man tore a gold chain from round Mom’s neck as she took her morning constitutional along the beach front. And a year or so before Dad died, he was attacked by two Coloured youths in town. They were after his wallet, he tried to resist, they ended up knocking him over and splitting his scalp on the pavement. Fourteen stitches but otherwise he got off lightly. Well – physically. The incident unsettled him deeply. He was a successful businessman, now retired, a family man, a loyal citizen, a pillar of the community, throughout his life respected by all his staff and servants, die ou baas (the old boss). What had gone wrong? It was as though South Africa itself, and not just two of its lawless children, had reached up and yanked him to the ground. He stopped going on walks, stopped going out much at all. He spent all day on the patio in front of the house, pacing around or sitting and sleeping; an old zoo animal yearning for the Africa it once knew. I can see this patio from the hotel balcony as Mom goes inside – or half see it. The security wall round the house is high and the foliage from her cherished garden grows tall. What with all this shade and the heavy sun awnings over its closed windows, the place has a hunched, secretive look.

I feel like a spy, perfectly positioned up here to observe that particular building. What clues can I pick up about my past life? As the week progresses it continues to disquiet and move me. I roll over in bed first thing in the morning and there it is. Like a waking dream. I did so much dreaming in that house down there; now it’s like I’ve become a dream myself, suspended above real life, a dream or a ghost. The shadowy atmosphere of Montagu House adds to these sensations: it looks like a house where everyone has died, a house that’s been shut up and sealed, a house I can no longer enter.

We moved there in 1959, when I was ten and known as Ant, which I deplored. I remember us all sitting on boxes and cases in the hallway that first evening – sunset and sea visible through the open door – eating sandwiches and drinking pop, surrounded by the smell of fresh paint and new carpets. I remember Mom commenting yet again on the lucky coincidence of this house’s name – she was born and brought up in Montagu, a pretty spa town 120 miles north-east of Cape Town – it was surely a sign that we were meant to live here, and live happily. I remember feeling very safe. I was in a strange place, yes, but Mom and Dad were here too, and my siblings, Randall (sixteen), Verne (thirteen), and Joel (four), and our trusty cook, Katie, and our current maid, Elizabeth. I would be looked after. My meals would be provided, my cases would be unpacked, my bed would be made, I didn’t have to do anything, make any decisions, explore this unfamiliar territory on my own. I wasn’t to know it then, but the next time I would change addresses, going into the army after school, and to England after that, the experiences would be so alarming that I’d be left with a permanent fear of moving. Now all journeys unsettle me, even small ones like between the homes that Greg and I keep in London and Stratford. ‘Is it the Wandering Jew in me?’ I ask Greg solemnly.

‘Maybe,’ he answers. ‘Or just your way of getting me to do all the packing.’

On that beautiful evening in 1959 I suppose it would’ve been our servants, Katie and Elizabeth, who hauled the cases upstairs and emptied the contents into drawers and cupboards. Supervised by Mom. Dad would’ve done nothing. He was probably pouring the second or third massive Scotch in the side room off the lounge, the room he was to claim as his den and bar. Maybe some of his drinking pals were round that night. These tended to be family, mostly uncles: Uncle Nicky and Uncle Arthur, Dad’s brothers – both very gentle men, the first large and calm, the second short and nervy (shell-shock from the war) – or Uncle Jack, married to Mom’s sister Rona: a charismatic man with large ears, big belly, a rolling walk, a twinkle in his eye.

At first I was in a big bedroom at the front of Montagu House, sharing with Joel. I remember standing at the window one day, soon after we moved in. The view was of the Queen’s Hotel, a marvellous colonial establishment, all rolling gardens and shaded verandas (later knocked down to build the President, where we’re currently staying), but what actually caught my eye that day was the sight of Dad hurrying along Alexander Road, heading up towards the roundabout, and Marlborough Mansions. His mother lived in the ground-floor flat. A huge East European woman with a faint moustache and the musty smell of old age, suddenly flapping her hands to alleviate her rheumatism, she terrified me. Dad was always popping up the road to see her, but there was something different today, something about his walk, his face. He didn’t look like Dad at all, but young and lost. That evening, Mom explained to us that his mother had died. I’m afraid I was rather relieved.

A few years later the big bedroom was split down the middle with a hardboard partition. I was delighted to get the half with the wall safe, which I prized. The division had been created to allow Joel and myself some privacy. Shortly afterwards I managed, I don’t know how, to get our Coloured garden boy, William, to give me foot and even bum massages. He stopped this after a bit and tried to explain why: ‘It’s not healthy, Master Ant.’ I felt disappointed. Still pre-pubescent, I was genuinely innocent of the fact that these pleasurable sensations were connected to something called sex. William was Cape Coloured and I’ve always found his people very attractive, with their long, lean muscles, the dance to their walk, their elastic-band accents stretching and snapping at words.

I was about fifteen when I started masturbating – in the bed in my partitioned room. I clearly remember the first smell of sperm (vaguely like some stuff Katie uses in the backyard, a kind of soap, or is it bleach?) and an overwhelming sense of relief; I’d been a late developer physically. Now I became very proud of the manly features appearing on my small body. One afternoon I brazenly changed out of my swimming trunks in front of a window which looked on to the upstairs stoep, while Margaret – our new current maid – was ironing there. She gave a sly smile and touched her head, the tight black curls there, commenting on what was sprouting in my groin. I took this as a sign of encouragement and a few nights later went into her room – the ‘maid’s room’ in the backyard – to show her my hard-on. Like William, she tried to find a way of explaining – ‘Haai no, this isn’t OK, Master Ant!’ I had made no clear plans for this particular hard-on – what I wanted her to do with it – and when she rejected me, I just assumed it was because she worked for us: she could get into trouble for initiating one of the young masters of the house. I knew nothing about the Immorality Act, forbidding sex across the race barrier.

I knew very little about the apartheid laws at all. I wasn’t aware that blacks were forced to carry passes, and to live separately, in townships. (This didn’t apply to Coloureds at first and when I was growing up their beloved District Six was still intact, in the middle of Cape Town.) Even though I was aged eleven in 1960, when the Sharpeville massacre occurred, I have no recollection of it. It wasn’t just that the government was ferociously efficient at censorship; no, ours was the most apolitical of households. The whole family voted for the Nationalists, in an automatic, non-thinking, but quite affectionate way, calling them the Nats. Mishearing at first, I thought this was a real name, another uncle perhaps – Uncle Nat. Neither of my parents read books much. Dad liked his morning and evening newspapers, the Cape Times and the Cape Argus, and Mom favoured glossy magazines from abroad, about fashion or Hollywood. No word of criticism about apartheid ever made it into Montagu House and, as far as I could see, all of us – the masters and servants living there – were perfectly happy.

In time I would come to understand that apartheid had a damage effect on us, the whites, the fat cats, as well as its obvious victims, known then as ‘non-whites’. You can’t grow up in a crazy world – a world that judges people on the colour of their skin – without going a little crazy yourself and my family have an impressive record (not untypical among South African whites) of drink problems, drug abuse, eating disorders and other cases of friendly fire. But during the fifties and sixties we thought we were happy. No, that’s putting it mildly – we thought we were in paradise. We’d made a pact with the devil for this paradise, but it was a tame one; it didn’t call for any violence or cruelty on our part.

‘This South African sunshine is nice and bright, hey?’ Uncle Nat said to us. ‘Just bask in it. Just close your eyes. Leave the rest to us.’

Whenever I talk about this, I hear myself sounding like the citizens of the towns of Dachau or Auschwitz – ‘We didn’t know, we didn’t know!’ In fact, I’m saying something worse – not that we didn’t know, but that we didn’t see. Robben Island was there, right there, clearly visible from the pretty white beaches of Sea Point, yet we didn’t see it. We closed our eyes and basked. Prisoners were on that island because their skin was the wrong colour, and there we were, fooling around with our own, trying for darker and darker tones, in our pitch-black sunglasses, not seeing.

If I really think hard I can summon a vague sense that something was wrong, just on the corner of my vision. The drunkenness of the Coloureds, for example. A vicious, despairing kind of drunkenness, with women fighting and men urinating in the gutter – these sights glimpsed from our air-conditioned limousines as we cruised past District Six en route for the bioscopes and department stores in town. There wasn’t a big black population in Cape Town, so their misery was even less apparent. But then one morning the Cape Times gave the inhabitants of Montagu House quite a fright, even the children. The paper felt duty bound to tell us about an evil plot, which had been uncovered and foiled by the police – just in time! Thousands of black people from the townships of Langa and Guguletu were planning to march on Cape Town and seize it. The newspaper published maps allegedly collected during the police raids, showing key points for the t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Now
• Part II Then
• Part III And Then Again
• Epilogue
• About the Author
• Copyright Information