Beside Myself Book

The title of Antony Sher's compelling autobiography, Beside Myself, refers to his sense of connection with twins, and a notion of alternative selves. This otherness serves him not only as one of Britain's most versatile and captivating stage actors, but also as novelist (four very readable novels, including Middlepost and The Indoor Boy), and visual artist. And to add to the ambiguity, Sher is not even strictly British, being South African of birth. One can begin perhaps to see the qualities that led to him being knighted in 2000, but perhaps also that drove him to a cocaine dependency that took courage, therapy and personal strength to relinquish. While Being Myself recycles material from Sher's two theatrical memoirs, Year of the King and Woza Shakespeare!, the most substantial interest is his relationship with his family, and life growing up in Cape Town. A mummy's boy, he had her love, but craved his father's, a fearsome yet sensitive, hard-drinking man who fell asleep during his son's performances. Sher left Cape Town at 19 for a London drama school, and went on to forge a career of marathon theatre roles, built on brilliantly shrewd characterisations, from Hitler to Stanley Spencer, making him perhaps the second-most-famous Jewish-South African actor after Solly Cohen--or Sid James, as he became better known. He allows a glimpse into the rehearsal rooms, and Green Rooms, of the best theatre directors of his generation, including Adrian Noble, Trevor Nunn, Mike Leigh and Steven Berkoff, and considers the low points as well as the many curtain calls. By his own confession fascinated with the persecuted who become the persecutors, at 50 Antony Sher seems keen to make peace with both emotional hemispheres of that dynamic within himself. A similar process in the other lead character, South Africa itself, which matures politically over a similar period, allows Sher to reconcile himself to his own past, making this a bravely unsentimental, honest confessional that speaks as eloquently of the man as the artist.--David VincentRead More