Old Vic’s master of disguise
The Independent 8th March 1997, John Walsh
When Michael Pennington was just 11, he was taken to the Old Vic theatre in London
– “dragged there”, as he now recalls, “because I knew it was going to be boring”
– plonked in a seat and told to watch Macbeth, as impersonated by Paul Rogers. The
effect was amazing. Countless early Bardophiles have said, as he now says, “It changed
my life”, but in Pennington’s case it’s literally true. It was like Ruth Lawrence
being giver her first sum, Ryan Giggs encountering his first spherical object, Mozart
hearing B flat major in his cot. Pennington went to the next production (John Neville
in Richard II) and the next and….”They were doing all the Shakespeares here in 1954,
so by the time 1 was 14 or 15, I’d seen the lot. It thrilled me. But it was completely
unbrainy. It was sexy”.
From that day, Pennington has devoted the major part of his life to the works of
the Avon swan. If his name and face are not as well known as his classical peers
(Ian McKellan, say, or Alan Howard), it’s because he has remained so grimly true
to the stage. His career suggests a man in the grip of an obsession, drenched and
drowned in Shakespeariana. He played Hamlet in a student production when at Cambridge
in 1964, and went directly from university to Stratford, has played every Shakespearean
male lead except Romeo, co-founded the English Shakespeare Company in 1986 with Michael
Bogdanov, the well-known critic-abuser, and toured their epic conflagration of the
history plays all over the known world under the title The Wars of the Roses. He’s
written a book about the ESC, and a notably convincing and sensitive study called
Hamlet: A User’s Guide. Without actually changing his name to Will, and acquiring
an Elizabethan ruff and a pointy beard, it’s hard to see how Mr Pennington can more
forcefully express his interest in our finest poet and dramatist.
He’s also been at pains to reinterpret the Bard for new generations and complexions
of theatre audiences – the young, the working-class, the criminal, the Third World,
the disadvantages…”The best Twelfth Night I ever saw,” he explains, “was in a school
production at Westminster, because the innocence of the performing was wonderful.
And though its heresy for an actor to say this, the ESC did a production of The Tempest
in Maidstone Prison, with two professional actors and a cast of lifers, which is
easily the best Tempest I’ve ever seen. It’s a play, of course, that’s centrally
concerned with freedom and imprisonment. Sometimes the crudeness or amateurishness
of the playing affects me more than any more sophisticated treatment can. Just as
the Shakespeare canon I saw in the mid-Fifties, though it was probably crudely done,
and we might curl our lip at it now, it probably comes closer to the blood and thunder
of what Shakespeare really is…”
Hmmm. Does Mr Pennington come across as a little too evangelical, as the kindly vicar
surveying the amateur dramatics society and muttering “Ah, bless them…”? That wouldn’t
be right. In the flesh, he seems with affectation, an unusually clever, thoughtful
and articulate chap, none of which adjectives can generally be applied across the
acting profession. His days as a dashing romantic lead (fair-to-blond curls swept
back from the handsome face and mile-high forehead) have crept past, leaving him,
at 53, looking a bit lean and shrunken, his sharp eyes hooded by Garfield lids. His
drily musical, Alec McCowenish voice is accompanied by a lot of graceful, actorish
hand gestures, but nothing that would prompt a rebuke (“And do not saw the air thus…”)
from Polonius. He is the very model of a professional actor, dependable and competent
but perhaps less disposed towards passionate risks that heretofore. And thus he seems
the right man to play Henry Trebell, MP, the lead role in Harvey Granville Barker’s
1926 play Waste, which kicks off the Peter Hall rep company’s new season at the Old
Vic next week.
He has, of course, played dozens of non-Bard roles in his career (Chekhov is a speciality).
But committing himself to Sir Peter’s rep for a long season – he will also be appearing
as Trigorin in The Seagull and Sir John Brute in Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife – is
a statement of intent for Pennington. It means he’s back in town, distaining television
and movies and touring and even Shakespeare, committing himself to the open stage
and expanding his range of roles. “I do count myself lucky to have done all the Shakespeare,”
he says, “but I’ve always been a character actor by instinct, a disguiser, rather
than a self-promoter. When I first went to Stratford, I was always saying ‘I don’t
want to play the student or the lover, can I play the guy’s father or the tractor
hand or something?’ “. He is proudest of having hoofed and sung as Archie Rice, the
“saloon-bar Priapus” in Osborne’s The Entertainer at the Hampstead Theatre. And he
was pleased with the huge risk of Strider: the Story of a Horse, at the National,
in which he played the eponymous equine, getting inside the role by spending two
gruelling hours a day learning prancing and dressage at the barre.
And now there’s Waste, a drama with reassuring Shakespearean ambitions. It’s politics
vs idealism, in which Henry Trebell, an independent MP and intellectual superman,
is wooed into a new Labour government and promised a seat in Cabinet on the understanding
that he will steer through Parliament a bill for the disestablishment of the Church
of England. But the repercussions of an affair with a loose-cannon married Catholic
woman start to wreck everything, even when the Prime Minister tries to smooth it
all over. It’s a very wordy, brittle and Shavian piece of work, in which everyone
talks political shop, everyone schemes in tuxedos and very long sentences, and the
air is thick with moral trimming.
“Barker is as good as Shaw I think,” says Pennington, “line by line and scene by
scene. He hasn’t any of that vanity and show-off quality that Shaw has. And I think
I understand why he’s not as big as Shaw; it’s because his writing is so…chaste.
His political arguments are very thorough. He doesn’t stop halfway through with a
joke, as Shaw would. He doesn’t simplify. He asks that you listen.” He gave a small
sigh, “and he’s provided the least commercial title of the century. Shaw would have
called it ‘A Statesman and a Scandal’ or ‘Too Pretty to be Good’, or something…”
The role of Henry - a smarter 1926 Cecil Parkinson – is hard to get in focus: he’s
a man who is, by turns, astute, unworldly, passionate, reclusive, a cold fish, a
ladies’ man, a political visionary, a political pragmatist…Pennington rises to the
challenge by playing him with near-permanent crinkly-eyed grin which only cracks
when someone yells in his face. I said I thought he was miscast. Did he have a clear
sense of Henry’s character?
“I’m getting there. It’s not as simple as it looks. The thing is, Barker breaks one
of the rules of drama, which is that a character should be just as he’s described
by everyone else. But before he comes on, they all say, he’s such a solitary, he
hates women – and first thing you see of the guy is when he’s literally charming
the knickers off a society girl.”
The ‘girl’ is Felicity Kendal, all flapper threads and coquettish wail, whom the
text requires Mr Pennington to kiss several times with impetuous, let-me-devour-you
enthusiasm. How had he come to terms with snogging the nation’s sweetheart every
night? “I must be the luckiest man in Britain,” he gallantly replied. Did they have
a bilateral no-tongues agreement? “I think tongues are cheating when it comes to
stage kissing,” says Pennington seriously, “because the audience can’t see it…But
playing love scenes is daft anyway. I’ve got away with it all these years – I’ve
never had to take my kit off. And now I’m too old for anyone to want me to. But for
girls, well – you simply won’t get through your career without having to do it, if
you’re halfway pretty…”
Back to the play. What is the “waste” the title refers to? Is it personal or political?
“It’s a play about a man who’s incapable of joining in. He’s 51, he has beliefs and
convictions, but he’s too proud to join in. he’s never married, never had a family.
Then two things happen: he gets fired up over a political issue and joins a government;
and suddenly the idea of parenthood is offered to him. Then both things are abruptly
taken away and the loss – the two wastes – are enough to destroy him.”
Pennington, so adept at teasing out motivation and latent passion in Shakespeare,
is frustrated by Granville Barker’s impermeable surface. “If it was Ibsen, there’d
come a point when a great fissure would open up in the text and all this emotional
lava would come out. But Barker never allows you that. I asked Peter (Hall) at the
beginning: ’How do I show what he’s really feeling?’ You look for the place where
it falls apart and you can’t find it.”
Had he met many politicians? “I sat beside Virginia Bottomley once,” he said with
evident distaste. “She came to see a play I was in, called Taking Sides and we went
to the Ivy (restaurant) afterwards. At the end she said, ‘What do you want me to
do, now I’m at Heritage?’ I remember pitching in with some things I feel strongly
about, like the fact that students can’t raise grants to train for the theatre anymore,
and have to write begging letters to people like me. All she would say was, ‘Ah,
but I believe drama schools are charging too much anyway’ which rather misses the
point. What struck me was, she spent most of the time in devotional posture, with
her hands on the table before her. It was only when midnight struck that I realised
she’d been looking at her wristwatch all evening. And at midnight on the nail, she
left.”
Was there a little unconfessed anger here? There was. It was about the L-word. “It
was when I heard her talking about this fairly harmless proposal of Blair’s, to spend
some Lottery money for some form of grant for actors and she described it as a ‘Luvvies’
Charter.’ “ Pennington practically smouldered in front of me, like Coriolanus or
Henry Trebell finding a cause to fight against. “It’s truly hair-raising that she
can express herself in this was and not care how unpopular she’s going to be among
the constituency she’s supposed to be looking after.”
Pennington’s combative streak has surfaced at several points in his career – when
globetrotting with a theatrical troupe, having blazing rows about the provision of
cooked breakfasts, and when resigning from the English Shakespeare Company five years
ago, after suffering the death of a thousand cuts at the hands of the Arts Council
(“I threw my resignation on the table in the middle of a board meeting, stormed out
and rang The Independent…”). Today, he’s past all the actor-manager histrionics,
the travelling Shakespeare show that was the Wars of the Roses. He lives in Highgate
and is extremely cagey about his private life: “I’m a single, heterosexual bachelor”
is all he’ll volunteer to the press. Noting his strong paternal streak, I asked if
he’d had children and yes, “I’ve a son of 30 called Mark, a very good illustrative
photographer. I’m going to be a grandfather in April. Mark is living in my house
in the country in Oxfordshire, so I’m dreaming of lots of grandchildren running about
under the apple trees…” How sweet to encounter such a fond prospect of retirement.
But, as parts go, it’s a bit on the quiet side for such a connoisseur of passion,
such a cautious observer of wasted lives.
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