Sher, an actor who approaches no role casually, has considered taking this one on since 1989, when he first read Levi's account of his annus horribilis. Pyant's delicate work and Howe's treatment of it is very much about shedding light on a daunting subject. The idea is to emphasize the changing locales in which the interned Italian Jew finds himself, as well as to indicate how Levi's states of mind change accordingly. It's not a single light in which Sher stands alone but one that begins shifting immediately after Levi enters, framed in a doorway. However, Paul Pyant - the original lighting designer of the production at London's National Theatre, where it premiered - and David Howe, who has presumably recreated that design, deviate from Sher's idea. In the script's introduction, Sher writes, "I don't believe it's possible to put Auschwitz on stage or film in any conventional sense.I think if this play is staged with the utmost simplicity and minimalism - a man alone in a light, just telling us his story, a story of almost inconceivable savagery and survival - it might be possible to make a powerful piece of theater." Director Richard Wilson has followed this instinct to the letter so has set and costume designer Hildegard Bechtler, who dresses Sher in a professorial vest, shirt, tie, and trousers and backs him up with plain gray walls that subliminally and symbolically suggest an unforgiving maze. (Levi himself didn't like the word "Holocaust" as a description of this major 20th-century event, but it's the most familiar one we have and is therefore employed here.)
#PRIMOPHOTO REVIEW HOW TO#
("Hell must be like this," Levi recalls thinking.) Only slightly less apparently, Primo is also about how to present aspects of the Holocaust in a theatrical entry. First, it concerns the Jewish chemist's appalling, year-long incarceration at Auschwitz. The piece deals with two fathomlessly compelling issues. In Primo, Sir Antony Sher's adaptation of Primo Levi's memoir If This Is a Man, the South African-born actor does some astounding one-man-play work.
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