It sounds like advice on avoiding Ryanair’s excess baggage charges, but in fact Travelling Light is the title of a new play by Nicholas (Vincent in Brixton) Wright about the movie industry.

The story starts at the dawn of the 20th century, and features a Jewish community living in a shtetl (“small town” in Yiddish) in Eastern Europe. Young Motl Mendl has an all-consuming passion in life: fired up by the newly-developed Lumière brothers’ camera, he is determined to become a film maker.

There is no shortage of neighbours willing to become actors — good, bad, or merely indifferent. But there is a distinct lack of money to buy film stock to put in the camera. Enter Jacob Bindel, successful local timber merchant. He’s only too willing to stump up the cash, but there’s a price to pay: he proceeds to interfere in every detail, however small.

Motl decides there is only one possible solution: leave home and seek his fortune in America. In this National Theatre premiere production, Jacob is played by famed South African actor Sir Antony Sher. Talking to him backstage after a performance, it immediately becomes clear that he identifies very strongly with the storyline.

“The play certainly resonates for me about leaving home, and home having an emotional tug which is completely irresistible. That rings very truthfully for me every time I go back to South Africa, particularly as I get older.

“I’ve been away a long time — I came here in 1968, but my homeland still has a very powerful pull.

“The shtetl part of Travelling Light is my own history. My grandparents came from Lithuania, from the same shtetl as each other — a place called Plunge — and in 1990 the National Theatre generously enabled me to go there, so I went to see the place my people came from: they would never have believed that one day a Sher would go back there out of fascination and interest. They left as shamed, second-class people, because they were Jewish and there was much anti-Semitism — I’m talking about the 1890s. It was a very moving experience for me.”

The role of Jacob, is a considerable change for him, Sher added with laughter.

“I don’t normally get to play people like him, with his kind of earthiness and honesty. I tend to play a lot of psychopaths! Jacob is not a psychopath, although he can be quite rough at times. I think of him as a sort of wild animal: we know that he was a feral child, and although he’s become a tamed wild animal, he’s still a bit like a lion — he will attack if provoked.”

So Jacob subconsciously becomes a forerunner of the famous, and infamous, Hollywood studio bosses of the future.

“I love all that in the play, it’s very cheeky,” Sher agrees with alacrity. “Even in this very primitive bit of early filmmaking you see the casting couch situation: the young girl can have the part as long as she can also be ‘a good friend’ to me!

“We also have what in modern parlance we would call the focus group, where an audience is invited to say what they don’t like about a film. I’m told filmmakers hate that more than anything else in the world!”

Travelling Light is at the Aylesbury Waterside Theatre from March 27-31. For tickets visit www.atgtickets. com/aylesbury or call 0844 871 7607