Michael Pennington

Though his instinct was to go for character parts, Pennington’s dashing good looks and physique suggested he was leading-man material, which led to his breakthrough role in Captain Jack’s Revenge at London’s Royal Court in 1971. He landed the title role soon after returning from a US tour of Hamlet, in which he played Laertes to Nicol Williamson’s prince. In the book, Pennington gives the first of many vivid character sketches of this all-but-forgotten actor, hugely respected and feared in his day, describing him as a “roisterer on the scale of Edmund Kean in times gone by”. For the duration of the tour, he became Williamson’s drinking buddy, often playing the role of chaperone to his unruly talent.

In 1974, convinced that his rightful place was in classical theatre, Pennington returned to the RSC and played a succession of leading roles – among them Angelo in Measure for Measure, Mirabell in The Way of the World, Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost – culminating in Hamlet in 1980, directed by John Barton.

Pennington recalls: “At the time I was in the running for the male lead in [film] The French Lieutenant’s Woman, along with Jeremy Irons, but the dates clashed with Hamlet. In the end I decided there would be other films but there might not be another opportunity to play Hamlet for the RSC. Some actors never get the chance at all. It seemed like the right moment for me.”

‘I had ambitions to do the heroic Shakespeares from an early age, but I didn’t go around telling everyone how good I was’

Barton was so determined to cast Pennington that he threatened to resign if the other RSC directors didn’t agree to it. “He kept his word like no other director I’ve ever known,” says the actor.

Who knows if it was the right decision, but for Pennington at that time it was a matter of destiny that turned out well. Critic Michael Billington put him in the front rank of Hamlets, writing that his prince was “both sharp-brained and sweet-souled, a natural rationalist who views his own bloodthirsty impulses with a self-critical amazement”.

Pennington’s career has been dominated and defined by his twin obsessions with Shakespeare and Chekhov, as an actor and a writer – he has been touring solo shows about both for more than 30 years. If there is a hint of regret that he is not as celebrated or well known as contemporaries such as Ian McKellen or Michael Gambon, it does not come across in his cheerful demeanour.

Did he ever consider trying his luck in America? “Yes, I did fancy going to the States but I didn’t think I’d have a chance. I didn’t have the contacts. I had a lot of near misses but there was a secret to it that I never discovered.”

It was some consolation that his much-admired King Lear was received with such enthusiasm at the Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn, in 2014. Ben Brantley in the New York Times described his performance as “devastating”. Another critic said he was “masterful”.

English modesty

As a young actor, he says he was outspoken yet privately in awe of the greats such as Scofield and Ashcroft. He did two plays with the former early in his career. In Christopher Hampton’s Savages in 1973, he says he saw a different side to the normally kindly Scofield, rarely glimpsed by the public. “I remember him saying to me once, after the show: ‘You’re taking forever over that big speech. You’re so slow.’ You suddenly glimpsed the seasoned professional who knows what works and what doesn’t. I took his advice because I revered him,” Pennington shares.

With hindsight, was he ambitious enough as a young actor? “I definitely had ambitions to do the heroic Shakespeares from an early age, but I didn’t go around telling everyone how good I was. Too much English modesty is not always a good thing in our game. You have to believe in yourself and you need inner strength. Most of all you have to be determined.”

In his 2015 book, Let Me Play the Lion Too: How to Be an Actor, described by one reviewer as “a rambling almanac to the profession”, Pennington sets about demystifying the actor’s craft, giving as much credence to TV soaps and a day’s work on a film as he does to playing Lear. It was almost a dry run for the recently published full-blown autobiography, although his intention in the earlier book was clearly to impart some of the tricks of the trade he has acquired over the years.

The earlier book includes his own witty and cautionary A-Z of theatre lore, from being out of work to representation, voice-overs, jealousy, and touring. “Theatre is a sexy thing,” he writes of touring. “You say, and are told, more gorgeous things than (you are) in life, and imaginations get inflamed.”

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Pennington is a veteran of numerous tours, especially when he was running the English Shakespeare Company with the late Michael Bogdanov in the 1980s. He played all the great roles in the history plays, plus Macbeth and Coriolanus. For six years, touring the UK and beyond, Pennington thought he was in heaven.

He says: “Initially, when I talked to Michael, we were going to do a modern play by Tom Murphy. Then we met up with the Arts Council to talk about funding, and they wouldn’t give us any money for that, but they said they’d give us money to tour Shakespeare’s entire history cycle in the UK because nobody ever gets to see them. I couldn’t have been happier.”

The ESC thrived on a mix of public and commercial sponsorship, with Bogdanov as director and Pennington as leading actor. Pennington also tried his hand at directing once, with a Spanish-themed Twelfth Night, which proved not only successful but durable, with different versions in Chicago and Tokyo.

Two constants

For the latter, he says: “I had hoped to re-interpret the play in Japanese terms, without doing a tourist Kabuki version. What I wasn’t prepared for was the extent to which the Japanese actors really wanted to become European actors. Malvolio, for example, had heard about Olivier’s performance at Stratford in 1956 and wanted to know what business Olivier had done as Malvolio. Until I had won their trust, there was real difficulty in persuading them to relate to their own traditions and culture in ways that were useful to the play.”

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Q&A Michael Pennington

What was your first non-theatre job?
I never had one, unless you count getting a 2:1 in English Literature in case I decided I wanted to teach.

What was your first paid theatre job?
Walking on, with no lines, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s History Play series at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1964.

Who or what was your biggest influence?
Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scofield.

What do you wish you had known when you started out?
How to stand up more boldly for myself.

If you hadn’t been an actor, what would you have been?
Probably a writer of some kind.

What is your best advice for auditions?
Keep calm. You’ll be nervous, but fight it off. They want to see your confidence.

Do you have any pre-show rituals or superstitions?
I keep breathing deeply at all costs. It’s amazing how calm that makes you.

In a career of great versatility, there have been two constants – his one-man shows about Shakespeare and Chekhov. The Shakespeare, called Sweet William, which is available on DVD, is a celebration – part scholarly, part actorly, wholly engaging; the Chekhov, first seen at the National Theatre in 1984, takes the form of an evening in the company of the great Russian writer towards the end of his life.

In the show, Pennington looks uncannily like Chekhov, adopting the air of a sophisticated raconteur as he offers up thoughts on a variety of subjects, from insomnia to womanising, encounters with Tolstoy and a harrowing visit to a Siberian prison camp for a survey he was commissioned to undertake. The actor plundered Chekhov’s stories – all 600 of them – his letters, his plays and assorted biographies, giving him enough material to allow him to vary the content according to the venue and location. The overall impression is of a man full of contradictions who had nevertheless an abiding empathy for people and their suffering.

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He says of his hero: “There was a cranky, oddball quality to Chekhov. He hated having visitors but he couldn’t do without them. He could also be short-tempered, petulant and strangely chauvinistic about women. I try to show how loveable he was. He gets under your guard and I always enjoy having him around.”

Just before the first lockdown in 2020, Pennington was at the Jermyn Street Theatre playing his first Prospero in a pared-down Tempest, directed by the venue’s artistic director Tom Littler. It lasted five performances. The Stage called it “a sonorous and compelling performance” and “an intriguingly nuanced take on one of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic characters”.

One-man shows

Having established a good working relationship with Littler, he hopes the production will return in the autumn. In the meantime, Jermyn Street has already welcomed back his Chekhov and will present two nights of Sweet William in July in its short-run Footprints programme.

With the challenge of performing two extremely wordy one-man shows in his late 70s, how does he remember it all? “I don’t,” he replies unexpectedly, adding that he feels sufficiently confident of his subjects these days to ad lib if he ever loses his way in the script. “Luckily the audience never seems to mind.”

‘I expect I’ll just drop dead one day, preferably after coming off stage as Firs at the end of The Cherry Orchard’

How does he feel he has changed as an actor, with age? “I’ve obviously improved with the years, technically and interpretatively, and become more what I’ve hoped for, a real character actor,” he responds.

It is almost impossible to imagine an actor of Pennington’s energy and enthusiasm retiring, even though he has achieved his ambition of playing all the great Shakespearean roles, and it seems he has few plans to scale back his workload. He says with a smile: “I expect I’ll just drop dead one day, preferably after coming off stage as Firs at the end of The Cherry Orchard.”

His partner, the arts administrator Prue Skene, happily reports that “the urge to stop seems entirely absent in Michael, and hurrah for it. Even for actors who haven’t done that much ‘resting’ in their careers it seems only right that they grab the chance to perform at all opportunities and all ages.”

CV Michael Pennington

Born: 1943, Cambridge
Education: Marlborough College; Cambridge University
Training: None
Career highlights:
• Hamlet, RSC, Stratford (1980)
• Crime and Punishment, Lyric Hammersmith (1983)
• Strider – the Story of a Horse, National Theatre (1984)
• Anton Chekhov (touring since 1984)
• Taking Sides, Chichester; West End (1995)
• The Entertainer, Hampstead Theatre (1996)
• Filumena, Piccadilly Theatre, London (1998)
• Timon of Athens, RSC, Stratford (2000)
• King Lear, Theatre for a New Audience, Brooklyn (2014)
Books:
• Hamlet: A User’s Guide (1996)
• Twelfth Night: A User’s Guide (2000)
• Are You There, Crocodile? Inventing Anton Chekhov (2003)
• A Pocket Guide to Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg (2004)
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A User’s Guide (2005)
• Sweet William: Twenty Thousand Hours with Shakespeare (2012)
• Let Me Play the Lion Too: How to Be an Actor (2015)
• King Lear in Brooklyn (2016)
Agent: Lesley Duff at Diamond Management

In My Own Footsteps is available now; Sweet William will play at Jermyn Street Theatre on July 30 and 31