Most actors, especially if they are steeped in Shakespeare as Michael Pennington
, will keep a secret list of the Shakespearean roles which they’d like to play. So
did the offer to give his Antony in Chichester Festival Theatre’s production of Antony
and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s great romantic tragedy, come as a surprise?
“It did, in a way” Michael replies. “I’d thought vaguely that it was time that I
was playing the Prospero’s and the Lear’s, although there has been quite a spate
of King Lear’s recently. So Antony wasn’t really on my radar, although more so perhaps
than Richard III or Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing which have never really appealed
to me. I’d played Antony before in an audio production for the Open University with
Lindsay Duncan but I’d always thought of Antony as being very stocky in stature -
like Anthony Hopkins who did in fact play the part opposite Judi Dench at the National
in the 1980s. But it’s been absolutely glorious to do. Once you start to work on
one of his plays, Shakespeare fires you off in all directions. All the possible options
you can take suddenly appear and once again Shakespeare so excites you that he turns
you into a cheerful insomniac.”
Michael’s long association with the RSC and his various books on Shakespeare give
him a particular insight into Antony and Cleopatra.
“The play is written, we think, quite late in Shakespeare’s career, in 1606 when
he was in his early forties, and you eel that he is experimenting. The action shifts
with great speed from Greece to Rome and back again, on land then on sea. Some scenes
are very long, others no more than eight lines. He sets himself all sorts of challenges.
You sense that he is restless, that he’s pushing the verse in new, different directions.
It’s incredibly luxuriant; it’s so sumptuous that it takes your breath away.
It’s a play that can be difficult to get right,” says Michael.
“You can be criticised if the play becomes over-produced in the lavish manner of
the Victorian theatre. On the other hand, some productions go to the opposite extreme
and make it too domestic. It’s as if Antony and Cleopatra were Mr and Mrs Smith rather
than heroic beings who are very conscious of their breeding and status. Janet Suzman,
our director, has made substantial cuts and so prepared the production so that for
the actors, it’s been like stepping aboard a gently moving bus.”
What kind of man is Antony? Is he the same dynamic character whose oratory in Julius
Caesar turns the tables on Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators?
“He’s much older and he’s beginning to think that he’s over the hill, although he
keeps challenging Octavius Caesar to single combat and so he must still think he’s
capable of fighting. And a lot of actors say that Antony and Cleopatra is ‘her’ play.
Antony can seem like a baffled old bull, in contrast to Cleopatra’s wit and personality.
She’s very mercurial and it can look as if he’s struggling to keep up with her rapid
speed of thought and changes of mind. He’s very different from the Mark Antony in
Julius Caesar; in fact, he’s hardly the same person. He’s abandoned his political
career for the sake of complete dedication to the cause of love. But he has great
generosity”.
With his long immersion in Shakespeare’s leading roles, Michael is a seasoned exponent
in the technique of Shakespearean verse-speaking.
“You know what to do and it’s a pleasure to speak it, but at the same time, you have
too watch yourself too. I occasionally hear myself speaking verse on recordings from
the 1970s and it sounds mannered and self-consciously musical. Nowadays,we try to
make the delivery of the verse as conversational as possible.”
Since Kim and Michael are playing two of history’s most famous lovers, it would be
difficult, and not at all desirable, if the actors worked in isolation.
“I think that they spend more time together than any other of Shakespeare’s lovers
and yet they spend most of that time quarrelling, mostly about the political situation.
How much does she really love Antony and how much is she keeping him on her side
politically? She winds him up, she wrong-foots him constantly and yet because he
is so besotted by her, he loves it.”
Having been born in Cambridge and read English at the local university, Michael took
the traditional actor’s route, ascribing his Upper Second to ingenuity. “I think
of myself as a brigand who didn’t work very hard but who still knows how to pass
exams.” His early introduction to the RSC in the 1960s was followed by a longer stay
during the next decade. “I’m sentimental about that period when I was hugely blessed
to work with what was an amazing company of actors.” His writing, he modestly describes
as “taking up the slack during the fallow periods.” A number of his books are subtitled
A User’s Guide and are intended to be practical manuals for actors working on plays
which Michael knows from first-hand experience. Despite his extensive experience
of Shakespeare, is he still making discoveries about the Bard?
“Yes I am. You’ll see a remarkable production that will immediately change your mind
about a play which you thought you knew. You can’t say much that is finite about
Shakespeare.”
With the stage figuring so strongly on his CV, Michael has found time only for periodic
appearances on television and, to his great regret: the cinema as well. Yet in the
minds of innumerable Star Wars enthusiasts around the world Michael will always be
cherished for his brief appearance in the third film The Return of the Jedi. This
association is the cause of some mixed feelings in Michael.
“I look at it now and I think I overact horribly and I can’t even remember the story-line.
We all did it for a song but I suppose that it has given we some kind of calling
card for movies. Whenever I come out of the Stage Door after a performance, all people
would ask about was Star Wars. Nowadays, there’s less of that and more about The
Iron Lady.”
Michael is referring to his recent role as Labour Leader Michael Foot opposite Meryl
Streep’s Margaret Thatcher.
“The record shows that he was a hopeless candidate taking o Mrs. Thatcher at the
1983 General Election. But Foot was also a remarkable man and he is the only critical
voice in the film. When we shot the scenes in the House of Commons, there was Meryl
Streep surrounded by fifteen stalwart British actors playing the tories and here
was I on the opposite side, with only the extras for company. I’m glad to have played
that lone voice; I think that a lot of us are still traumatised by Margaret thatcher.”
Perhaps Michael takes most pride in his co-founding of the English Shakespeare Company
in the 1980s when he teamed up with the ebullient, somewhat maverick figure of director
Michael Bogdanov.
“In retrospect, I’m most struck by the sheer bravura and unlikeliness of it. It’s
given me a fund of remarkable stories to dine out on, particularly about some of
the scrapes which we got into. Yet at the same time we also succeeded in turning
a lot of young actors, who might have drifted off elsewhere, into Classical actors.
And I see the influence of the ESC everywhere, wherever Shakespeare is done in belt
and braces, whenever the productions are irrelevant and joyful.”