Antony Sher is keen to follow Pete Postlethwaite and Jonathan Pryce onto the Liverpool stage, he tells Laura Davis

IT’S impossible for Antony Sher to separate his current theatre role from his personal history. Travelling Light is set in a remote Eastern European village not too different from the Lithuanian shtetl his grandparents were forced to flee in the 1890s.

Both stories – the fictional one about a Jewish boy who becomes a 1930s Hollywood director and the real one in which Sher’s family emigrate to South Africa – are tales of determination and survival against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Nicholas Wright’s new play, which is being screened live to Merseyside cinemas direct from the National Theatre in London, is the gentler of the two narratives however. Sher plays Jacob, a wealthy timber merchant who agrees to finance young filmmaker Motl’s ventures.

“He’s an illiterate man but with a natural gift for storytelling and for business,” says the actor, whose Everyman contemporaries are the theatre’s most famous alumni and include Jonathan Pryce, Alison Steadman, Pete Postlethwaite, Bernard Hill and Julie Walters.

“You see an embryo Hollywood producer in this character, who’s terrific, earthy, slightly larger than life. It’s a great part to play.”

The cast includes Liverpool actor Lauren O’Neil, from Allerton, who plays Anna, a villager who helps Motl create his films.

“She’s absolutely terrific,” says Sher of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama graduate.

As well as the meatiness of the role, it was Sher’s family background that attracted him to the play.

“It resonates enormously with my own history and is part of the pleasure of doing it,” says the 62-year-old, who used his grandparents’ journey from Lithuania to South Africa as the basis for his first novel, Middlepost (1989).

In the 1990s, he visited the shtetl where they had lived before the tide of anti-semitism forced them out.

“They were very much treated as second class citizens and they left in disgrace, feeling most uncomfortable about this place they’d been brought up in,” he says. “It would have been unimaginable to them that 100 years later a Sher would be going back out of fascination.

“Of course it wasn’t as they would have known it. The Holocaust had wiped out the entire Jewish population and there was a massacre in 1943. There was one Jew left, who met me.”