Wilson and Sher travelled to Auschwitz whilst researching the play. Sher was confined in the back of a lorry and German actors were hired to shout out orders to him in order to give him some feel of the powerlessness and confusion Levi experienced during his incarceration. Sher said that he found the play terribly draining; he refused to extend the play or to tour with it.[citation needed]
^"Homepage".National Theatre. Retrieved29 November 2022.
^Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer, 1 October 2004, "At the end of this remarkable performance there was a silence unlike any other I have experienced in a theatre. Antony Sher's performance, directed by Richard Wilson on a stark, spare design by Hildegard Bechtler, and occasionally tellingly punctuated by a solo cello, is as controlled, as precise, and as free of hysteria, as Primo Levi's own lucid prose. He (Antony Sher) captures Levi's unsparing depiction of his fellow inmates, forced to prey on each other in order to survive. As a result, the moments of kindness and generosity the author witnessed at Auschwitz shine with a tentative, almost unbearable beauty."
^http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/4456/primo The Stage, Listings and Reviews, Primo, Published Monday 4 October 2004 at 11:50 by Peter Hepple, "It is best not too look on Antony Sher’s adaptation of Primo Levi’sIf This Is a Man as a plain piece of theatre. It is far too powerful and affecting for that, this description of a period – mercifully quite short – of imprisonment in Auschwitz."
^http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/4456/primo The Stage, Listings and Reviews, Primo, Published Monday 4 October 2004 at 11:50 by Peter Hepple, "A major part of the success of this – one can only call it a recital rather than a play – is due to the director Richard Wilson, with the help of the designer Hildegard Bechtler, the lighting designer Paul Pyant and the composer of the stark and spare cello score, Jonathan Goldstein."
