Michael Pennington has lived with William Shakespeare for most of his life. As a
child, watching Paul Rogers as Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1955 inflamed his imagination
and propelled him into a career on the stage. During the past 40 years he has starred
as Hamlet for the RSC and directed plays including Twelfth Night at the Chicago Shakespeare
Theater. In 1986, he and director Michael Bogdanov founded the English Shakespeare
Company, which boldly re-imagined The Henrys and adapted The Wars of the Roses for
the politically turbulent Eighties.
Pennington has also penned guides to Hamlet, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. His one-man show, Sweet William, about Shakespeare’s life and work, has been
met with great acclaim throughout Europe and in the USA.
Now, in Sweet William: Twenty Thousand Hours with Shakespeare, Pennington builds
on his wealth of experience to illuminate the pleasures and pitfalls of Shakespeare’s
play as they have been staged throughout the years. Brimming with insight, wit and
passion, this book has something to offer everyone from scholars and actors just
starting out, to avid theatre-goers.
Why did you decide to write a book in addition to your solo show?
When I put the show together in 2006-7, I’d played around with lots of alternatives.
There was an immense amount of material that I could use. But I hadn’t timed it concentrated
on what I had to choose. I realised when I finished the script that while I only
needed something like 40 pages, I had ended up with about 150 pages of stuff. So
behind the show had always sat this file of other material. I have an opinion on
everything to do with Shakespeare. I could have gone on all night if people had been
willing to stay! So, I thought, instead of doing another four or five shows, why
not write a great big bumper book about Shakespeare instead.
Why not just publish an extended version of the script?
There didn’t seem to be much point in doing that because a large part of the show
is performance. I improvise it to some extent and no one else is going to get the
rights to do it. I had also already written three books about different Shakespeare
plays. Like those, I call this one a user’s guide, based on the metaphor that every
car has a slightly different engine. If you can look at the engine, see a characteristic
weakness in it or something that distinguishes it, well the same applies to a Shakespeare
play as well. I do not necessarily drive a Ford on the left- or right-hand side
of the road, but it can be helpful to know how the engine works.
The market is bursting with books on Shakespeare. What can you offer?
If I say it is unique, it is not because I think I am so magnificent; and if I say
no one else could write it, it is not because I think I am so much better than everyone
else. But I have a particular mixture of showmanship and scholarship. And it’s always
struck me as off that so few practitioners write much about theatre and especially
about Shakespeare. I can’t think of an actor who has set out to write an entire book
about a single play, let alone a book about his entire corpus. The last person to
do anything like this was Harley Granville Barker, back in the Thirties - a working
writer, actor and director who wrote about his findings. So I’m tilting at him a
little bit, even though his stuff is very much of its time. His prefaces still read
well but his social and sexual politics are quite dated.
In the book you are not afraid to say when you dislike a play, are you?
No, but my criticism is affectionate. It’s like talking about a partner you have
been with for a very long time. You can make a joke at their expense. I have spent
most of my life with Shakespeare. He has some funny habits. He doesn’t always finish
plotlines and occasionally leaves things hanging around. His house can be quite untidy!
But it is all provisional. If I say that I don’t like Much Ado About Nothing, I am
just waiting for the production that is going to change my mind. In the book I rather
flippantly describe Antony and Cleopatra as a study of middle-aged folly. But I am
doing the play later in the year and I am sure I am going to want to cancel that
chapter and write something else afterwards. I keep having new ideas all the time.
Is your aim to reassure those who might otherwise approach Shakespeare with trepidation?
Yes, because a lot of people, particularly younger actors, are frightened of Shakespeare.
A friend of mine recently tried out his audition pieces on me. He was doing Shakespeare
for the first time and he was clearly scared of it. He settled himself into a sort
of lotus position, did something with his chin and produced a sound that had no relationship
with his voice. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was focusing on
breathing at the end of every line. He thought this was the only way to keep the
meter going. I explained that he could still do that while taking up any tempo he
wanted, just like a musician.
And Shakespeare allows you to do that?
We are dealing with the simplest form of verse imaginable. Invented by a man who
had to communicate with illiterate people and highly educated Latin speakers in the
same split second. He had to find a way to do it that would work for everybody. That
was, and is, his incredible gift. Not all of the mythology we now have about Shakespeare
should be spoken is bunkum, but most of it is quite unhelpful
How so?
So much fuss is made about form. It is the Victorians’ fault. If you listen to then
on CD almost all of them sound unbearable - including people you would expect to
be good, like Ellen Terry or Sybil Thorndike. With my company, the ESC, I went through
a period that was dedicated to making the verse sound as simple and natural as possible
without screwing up the poetry. The productions were on the money, politically, but
also in terms of the speaking style. We had a lot of young actors who started out
frightened of Shakespeare but ended up using the text very much as we use English
now. Ralph Fiennes’s film of Coriolanus is a marvellous demonstration of how vernacular
Shakespeare can be. The actors don’t mess about with the lines, they just SAY them.
I’m much more interested in seeing that than I am in any kind of doctrine.
Would you agree with people who argue that updating his language is the only way
to make Shakespeare accessible?
Yes. All you have to do deal with is that some of the words are unfamiliar and that
occasionally he takes six or seven lines to develop an idea. That is the main technical
difficulty for actors because we don’t talk like that now. To sustain an argument
and have enough breath to do it, is the tricky thing. But of course there is the
music. The more you speak the stuff the more you notice things like his fantastic
use of the monosyllable, which is like the hook of a pop song. Obviously, that’s
the fruit of many years of practice. But the starting point for any actor should
simply be to treat it like a man or woman talking to someone. You can go far further
in that direction than you might think you can.
You devote a section of the book to parents and children in Shakespeare. Why does
that fascinate you?
I suppose it is because his plays almost always feature single parent families. He
does it so much that it is striking. Where’s Mrs Lear? Are there any nuclear families
in Shakespeare? Why not? Is it something to do with him? We get excited because we
feel we are getting some autobiography at last. We have the desire for writers to
be confessional. And he is, to an extent. The death of his son and the fact that
he wrote Constance’s speech in bereavement in King John so close to the event? It
clearly comes from the heart; likewise with the failed or bankrupted father figure
(like Shakespeare’s own). But, as always, you can hear Shakespeare laughing at you
- because these relationships work in the theatre. They are much more dramatically
interesting than the cosy nuclear family. So you can never be sure if it is not just
theatrical opportunism.
That fits with the way you use facts to humanise rather than psychoanalyse Shakespeare
- portraying him as a jobbing playwright looking to pull in a crowd.
It is the safest assumption. He produced two plays a year in a highly competitive
industry. But even saying that feels unsatisfying, because we want to get at him.
The whole authorship controversy has to do with frustration at not being able to
get a sense of him, unlike some of his contemporaries. What sort of bloke was he?If
he were sitting here now, would we recognise him? Was he short or tall?
Would you say that social snobbery has played its part in the authorship controversy?
Yes, as well as a misunderstanding of his level of education. The fact is that he
was very well educated. His Latin and Greek would have pretty much been to our university
standards even though he went to grammar school and left when he was 14. He would
also have learned rhetoric and argument - schooling was very different to now.
Do you have a favourite play?
It is all the same play - that is the thing. Three hours multiplied by 37. What is
so striking about Shakespeare is that you can’t say: “He started out not being very
good before getting better and then declining later on.” Romeo and Juliet and Richard
II are early plays but they are as strong as anything he wrote. In that sense he
was a genius, because he didn’t mature in the same way that we expect our artists
- and indeed ourselves - to do. He had good and bad days throughout his life. Do
I have a favourite play? It is usually the one I have just done. That said, playing
Hamlet for two years in the circumstances that prevailed at the RSC in the early
Eighties and having the part walk in step with my life was an incredible opportunity
and privilege.
In Subsequent Performances, Jonathan Miller talks about discovering something new
each time he revisits a play. Do you ever go back to a part?
Directors can; actors do not. Those of Gielgud’s generation might have played Hamlet
five times. But who can do that now? Ken Branagh, maybe. But he makes it happen.
The profession is so crowded that you are lucky if you get one shot at a part these
days. What you do instead is go and see the same play over and over again and notice
different things. For example, Much Ado… never made much sense to me until I saw
Marianne Elliot’s production, set in Cuba, at the RSC a few years ago. So, you are
more likely to revisit a play as an audience member than a practitioner.
From talking about Olivier and Gielgud to the challenge facing younger actors today,
there is a strong sense of theatrical legacy in your book. Why is that important
to you?
It is one of the penalties of getting older. You cannot help but find yourself in
the position of using terrible metaphors like “handing on the baton”. I don’t mean
that in a patronising way, it irritates me when actors of my generation warm their
bums against the fire and go, “Oh, the verse isn’t spoken like it used to be.”It
is an oedipal thing. And if it is true it is because there is not the same opportunity.
Since the rep circuit broke down actors do not have the same chance to do Shakespeare
that much. We were very lucky and we have got to be encouraging. He is there to take,
a common coin rather than to be aspired to. So I hope that my overall position comes
across as a positive one.
What do you see as the future for the staging of Shakespeare in this country?
I don’t know where it is going to go. Economics may mean that more and more you are
going to have to go to small rooms to see plays performed by underpaid actors or
to somewhere like the National to see huge, operatic versions. I want to do King
Lear in a small theatre. I would really like to see how intimate you can get. I did
a late Ibsen at the end of last year, When We Dead Awaken, at the Print Room, which
is the size of a postage stamp! How do you deal with this high-falutin play, which
is supposed to end with an avalanche, in a way that makes sense in Westbourne Grove?
I think we succeeded more often than we failed - the audience was right with us.
The Print Room is a fantastic space.
Are the best productions sometimes in smaller venues because space and budget are
limitations demand inventiveness?
Absolutely, that is the fun of it. And I have been re-enacting the large/small debate
with my own show. I started at the Little Angel and then did a season at the Arcola,
before going to the huge Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. I loved the Arcola because
you just have to talk. I also did Studio 2 at Trafalgar Studios, which was interesting
because the audience was so close. But then there is something about Shakespeare
that just blooms when you have air and space. So I have yet to settle on one thing
or another.
Do you have any thoughts on the upcoming World Shakespeare Festival?
I think this is going to be a year when the country congratulates itself on creating
the fantastic playwright. The fact is that he created us. He is responsible for our
language and we quote from him all of the time. It is conceivable to imagine life
going on here without Shakespeare. He prepared the soil for us. But politicians are
going to be misquoting him, like Michael Portillo did when he used Troilus and Cressida
to more or less say he would have been a Conservative voter. Shakespeare is going
to be co-opted and claimed by everyone. He is going to get lost in it all. I am glad
I got my book out early because there are going to be a lot more!
Finally, what makes a good Shakespeare actor?
I have to be careful not to get too fancy about this. There is something quite spiritual
about performing Shakespeare. If you think about his characters and their journeys,
what you need is an actor is the temperament, imagination and willingness to do.
It is beyond technique, being able to speak it or having the athletes to keep up
- you need a kind of modest heroism. I can’t put it better than that.