Andy DeEmmony - God on Trial (2008)

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It’s not every day you hear the Almighty described as ‘a cheating bastard’. But during BBC2’s God on Trial, a demanding 90-minute drama starring the Olivier Award-winning actor Sir Antony Sher and written by Frank Cottrell Boyce (Welcome to Sarajevo), the inmates of Auschwitz submit Him to an even greater indignity: they put Him on trial.

There is no historical evidence that such a trial took place. Cottrell Boyce’s drama is based on a widely repeated Second World War story that is most likely apocryphal.

During the trial, held in an Auschwitz dormitory hut the night before half the prisoners will be gassed, a disparate cast of characters – including a physicist, a law professor, a criminal and two rabbis – debate the charges levelled against God. In allowing the Nazis to commit genocide, has He broken His covenant with the Jewish people? Is the Holocaust an act of purification, like Noah’s flood? Or is it evidence, as writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi argued, that God does not – indeed cannot – exist?

According to Sher, who plays Akiba, a Polish Rabbi who remains silent for the first hour of the trial and is then the final ‘witness’ to give evidence, there are no straightforward answers. ‘God on Trial is a very powerful and unsettling piece,’ he says. ‘Each of the characters’ speeches is so convincing. I think the viewers are going to find themselves swinging back and forth between the different arguments.’

The director Andy de Emmony (Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa!) heightened the tension by recording the trial in 20-minute takes, and by shooting scenes from several angles at once. ‘Andy was filming with three cameras,’ says Sher, ‘which were semi-hidden among the extras on the bunk beds. He wanted to create a sense of eavesdropping on the trial and, with the three cameras, the actors had to commit totally all the time because, regardless of who was speaking, you didn’t know whether you were on camera.’

Sher is one of the trustees of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which takes British schoolchildren on trips to Auschwitz to explain to them what happened there. In a similar way, he hopes that God on Trial will introduce this most distressing and provocative of subjects to a wider audience. ‘I think there can never be too much done on the subject of the Holocaust,’ says Sher, ‘to stop people like [discredited historian] David Irving saying it didn’t happen. It’s terribly important that this debate is happening in God on Trial, and terribly important that it’s happening on a mass medium like television.’