Sweet Reason
What’s On In London, 11th September 1981, Robert Cushman
I go a long way with Michael Pennington as Hamlet: in fact to 1964 when we were both
Cambridge undergraduates (he was in his last year, I in my first). He played the
part then and I reviewed him in it, describing it as “the most intellectually exciting
performance I had seen at Cambridge.” That was probably a pretentious way of putting
it, and anyway it earned me curious glances from the blood-and-guts school of university
theatricals who believed that feeling was all and thinking vulgar: a position on
which they intellectualised at great length. Anyway what I meant of Pennington was
that he said every line as if it meant something, something fairly uncommon among
amateurs, especially in Shakespeare, and not always to be taken for granted among
professionals either. From that Hamlet to this, Pennington has maintained an exemplary
clarity of vocal line.
What I didn’t know at the time was that my notice, which appeared in a short-lived
student newspaper, did something to launch him on his career. It came, together with
a review by George Steiner (who, being more famous than I at the time, was published
in The Guardian) to the attention of Maurice Daniels, administrator at the Royal
Shakespeare Company. He was moved to come to Pennington’s next performance, which
was Troilus in ‘Troilus and Cressida.’ On the strength of that performance Pennington
was offered walk-on roles in what remained of that year’s Stratford season. It happened
to be the famous histories season, and he found himself literally carrying spears,
and other fearsome weapons, over and around John Bury’s daunting sets for ‘The Wars
of the Roses’. The following year he was asked back to play speaking roles, the
first being Dumaine, “one of those awful supporting lords” in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’,
a production that represented John Barton’s first solo flight; it was Barton who,
15 years later, was to direct his Stratford Hamlet. In that ‘Love’s Labour’s’ Pennington
also understudied the leading role Berowne, and for several performances got to play
it: it’s a role he got to repeat, at more leisure, in Barton’s second and justly
acclaimed production of the comedy a couple of years ago.
Also in that 1965 season Pennington had his first professional brush with Hamlet:
this was in Peter Hall’s famous politicised production with David Warner as an alienated
student prince. Pennington played a fair, cold Nordic Fortinbras: Denmark looked
to be in at the end for a Fascist take-over. Fortinbras, of course, doesn’t come
on till near the close. During the first part of the evening he was occupied by playing
one third of the ghost. The Ghost in this production was a twelve-foot mobile, with
Pennington at its base, another actor above him, and right at the top Patrick Magee
speaking the lines and getting the billing. Afterwards Magee departed, leaving behind
a tape of his voice for Warner as Hamlet to synchronise with as best he could, so
really nobody played the Ghost. There was just these two nervous young actors, pent
up, unable to see where they were going, trying to navigate round a raked stage.
As Pennington says, “when you’re starting out you’re anxious to please” and he was
scared of ruining the scene by bumping into something or someone, or toppling over.
In the end he had to receive ‘walkie-talkie’ guidance from stage management.
A few years later, he became involved in another notable ‘Hamlet’: that of Nicol
Williamson at the Roundhouse, in which he played Laertes, a part he thinks he understands
now but didn’t then. But what’s interesting is that, having supported the two great
anti-romantic Hamlets of recent times, he should now be giving a performance much
closer to the sweet (and aristocratic) prince of theatre tradition. He remembers
playing the role at Cambridge as being “very enjoyable” (contrary to his expectations),
and feeling that Hamlet “ wasn’t a neurotic – there was nothing odd or unbalanced
about the man. What is strange is to discover what a passive central character he
is; he’s so defined by events. And that” he says, as if brought up short by the realisation
“is what I still think.”
When you come to study the role there are all sorts of surprises, like the fact that
among all his grievances Hamlet “doesn’t seem to resent being deprived of the throne.”
(I pointed out that there is a line about Claudius being the usurper ‘ popping in
between the election and (Hamlet’s) hopes’ but had to agree that it’s only an isolated
passing reference). So where does the actor go for a line on Hamlet? Ophelia gushes
over him, but then she’s in love with him, and anyway her eulogy refers to the prince
as he was, before tragedy. Pennington says that Hamlet “seems courteous, considerate,
naturally affectionate” but he talks most enthusiastically not about the character
but about telling the story. “Sometimes you can make people think that this Hamlet
can actually kill the King at his prayers” - can give them, in fact, the kind of
thrill Pennington himself got as a schoolboy in the ’50s when he saw most of Shakespeare’s
plays at the Old Vic and determined that he would be an actor himself.
He has a good academic background: he was, I think, the only actor in a luminous
undergraduate generation to get a good degree; and he works well with Barton, that
scholarly renegade, equally capable of shocking the academic world with his showmanship,
and the theatrical world with his insistence on treating verse as a formal medium
and on working out all the antitheses. It was Barton who gave him his professional
chance at Hamlet (flattering because a “director doesn’t just decide he’d like to
do the play – he must want to do it with a particular actor”) and Barton who first
pulled him from the ranks for ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ “He was very rigorous and demanding
then – now he’s more relaxed. You can see the development in him from the romantic
quality he added to his second production of that play.”
Between his two periods as an RSC actor Pennington spent “nine inchoate years” that
included some West End plays and a lot of television. He had speedily reached a modest
plateau of success – he got good parts – but didn’t seem to be rising above it. At
one awful moment he seemed to be sinking. He got a message in 1974 to see Peter Gill
who was directing ‘Twelfth Night’ at Stratford, and wanted to see him about the part
of Valentine, a very minor walking gentleman. Gill explained, when seen, that there
had been a mistake; really he wanted to discuss the more important role of Orsino.
This in fact didn’t work out, but that night Gill casually mentioned the meeting
to Keith Hack who was directing ‘Measure for Measure.’ So it was that Pennington
came to play Angelo in maybe the most vilified production ever seen at Stratford
(one to which he still avows a certain loyalty). The ’74 season was not a great success
but several of the newer actors in it – Pennington, Francesca Annis, Richard Griffiths,
Ian McDiarmid – were creamed off and asked back for 1976. In the interim Pennington
was sent on active service abroad, with the standby RSC anthology shows ‘The Hollow
Crown’ and ‘Pleasure and Repentance’; he also took a train-journey across Russia
which he commemorated in a book called ‘Rossya’ which he wrote and published. Both
the journey and the book are among the occasional eruptions in the life of a placid-seeming
man; like the electric surprises that can occur in what generally seems meticulous,
well-considered acting.
1976 was a watershed year at Stratford and, says Pennington, carefully planned as
such with a company “hand-picked” by Barton and Trevor Nunn. It was the year of Ian
McKellan’s ‘Macbeth’, of Donald Sinden and Judi Dench in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’.
For Pennington it was Mercutio (a favourite role), Hector and – a role he especially
asked to play – the sixty-year old right-wing major in David Edgar’s ‘Destiny’. “After
putting my make-up on I gazed in the mirror and found I looked like my father.” He
says that “the company was different from anything I’d known before. It was much
smaller; everything was simpler.” After the obligatory year in London, showing off
their wares at the Aldwych and adding new ones “we were hacked off into different
regiments. Ian McKellan, Bob Peck, Roger Rees all went off on tour with the company
that eventually created ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, I went to Stratford – to the Duke in
‘Measure for Measure’ and to Berowne, playing opposite Jane Lapotaire” (with whom
he now lives in a manner of speaking; most of this last year she’s been in New York
playing Piaf). He is now into his third Stratford-London cycle, his eighth consecutive
year with the RSC, and with the new Barbican theatre ahead there are inducements
to stay on yet longer. But there is also the urge to try something else, to act before
cameras again. He only took on Hamlet after two months of indecision; he had also
been offered the chance of film-stardom in ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ – “and
I’d spent 15 years getting there.” But if there are any regrets over his choice,
he doesn’t betray them. As he says, the modern actor doesn’t get the opportunity
that Gielgud had to play Hamlet four or five times. Many fine actors either haven’t
had the chance at all, or have had to take it with the wrong company or the wrong
director. At Stratford last year he wasn’t ‘a Hamlet of our time’, just as the production
was not a large-scale political allegory. We saw a human story which explored the
plays fascination with the idea of acting, and with both a human being and an actor
at its centre. “The more you grip the audience with the narrative the better; they’ve
got to think ‘there, but for the grace of God’.”
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