To watch Antony Sher onstage was an uncommonly visceral experience.
I mean a physical response, the kind that registers in your muscles, your stomach, your bones.
Yet the concentration and physiological specificity with which he embodied characters, from power-hungry medieval monarchs to a 20th-century sensualist painter, made you tense up in anatomical empathy.
After seeing him in the title role of “Primo,” on Broadway in 2005, I found myself walking gingerly as I left the theater, and I imagined I could sense other audience members doing the same.
And you knew, on a gut level, that the six-digit tattoo etched on his arm was only the most superficial emblem of how this man had been scrawled upon by inhuman hands.
That sense of wrestling with and overcoming the limitations of the fallible human form was spectacularly evident in the performance that made him a star: Shakespeare’s Richard III.
The resulting portrait was of the “bottled spider,” the “bunch-backed toad” as a man who had taken thorough inventory of the limitations of his body and transformed perceived weaknesses into weapons.
But I cherish my memories of his Macbeth, directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company by Sher’s partner Gregory Doran, which came to the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., in 2000, with the marvelous Harriet Walter as the thane’s murderous wife.
And Sher’s Macbeth was infused with the sense of ambition stretching arduously to make its possessor smarter, nobler, larger than he really was.
But even as he did his damnedest to defy gravity, there was no doubt that Stanley’s ecstatic energy had its source in the carnal, the corporeal, the animal, with an attendant, sorrowful awareness of the way of all flesh.
That you felt, so completely, the effort required for a human body to take flight made you marvel all the more at the accomplishment.