Theatre Magazine,
1979, Gordon Gow
The talent flexing of alternating rôles in a
repertory season could hardly be illustrated better than by the four contrasted
assignments of Michael Pennington in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current
London schedule. Pennington has developed into that highly satisfactory kind of
leading man whose versatility ensures that his work is so diversified as to
look constantly fresh. Three of his characterisations this season are
carry-overs from last year in Stratford-upon-Avon: Berowne in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (already
in the Aldwych rep.), the Duke in “Measure
for Measure” (joining the line-up later on), and the title rôle in the
‘modern Hippolytus,’ by David
Rudkin after Euripides (which originated at The Other Place in Stratford and
goes into The Warehouse, the RSC’s London studio space, in June). Additionally,
a new production starting at the Aldwych on May 23rd gives him the
rôle of Shervinsky in Mikhail
Bulgakov’s “The White Guard”:
a curiosity not seen in London since 1938, when its run at the Phoenix was cut
very short on account of the war. Pennington finds it a thoroughly absorbing
exercise.
“The play deals with the last spasms of resistance
from the White cause immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the
Civil War. The characters are soldiers, but Shervinsky is not a fighting man:
he’s an aide-de-camp. He’s also about to become an opera singer. And they all
make their adjustments to life under the Revolution, as the Bolsheviks finally
arrive in Kiev, which is where the play takes place.
“The one thing that is clear is that the
interpretative artist, in some ironic way (and as distinct, say, from a
writer), is able to survive any political change: Shervinsky embarks on his
singing career with every probability of success. He’s a man who wants to be a
singer but has to be a soldier in the meantime.”
Taking a not very unsympathetic view of the
counter-revolutionary ‘White’, it was evidently rather a daring piece for the
Moscow Art Theatre to essay, when they performed it for the first time in 1926.
“It was written first as a novel. The Moscow Art Theatre invited Bulgakov to adapt
it, but it was felt that the title ‘The White Guard’ was dangerous, so they
called it ‘The Days of the Turbins’ that’s the name of the family in the story.
They had immense difficulties getting it on. The opening was postponed many
times, because for obvious reasons there was enormous trouble with the censor.
So now the play remains very nicely balanced politically. There was some abuse
when it went into the repertoire. But Stalin loved it: his view was that if the
Whites were that formidable, how much more formidable must the Revolution have
been!
“It has a Chekhovian surface to it. It appears to
be in the direct line of the Stanislavsky/Chekhov naturalistic tradition. And
that may have been due to Stanislavsky’s influence on the adaptation, because
the novel is much more allegorical. It combines the richness of relationships
of a Chekhov play with the political sensibility of a Gorky play, but I hope
that it’s not like either of these things: I hope it’s something of it’s own.”
The rôle of Shervinsky calls for Pennington to be
sometimes in uniform, sometimes in disguise, and in white tie and tails for his
singing debut. Carrying a costume with apparent ease is one of the actor’s
gifts, it would seem; but ask him whether the flair comes naturally, or if it
has been painstakingly acquired, and his eyebrows shoot up in manifest
surprise. “I’ve never thought about it. It’s a theatrical tradition, of course,
that there is a way of moving in certain clothes, just as there’s a way of
tackling a line of blank verse. The root of all that is the way certain styles
of costume impose certain manners on the body. If you put on a Restoration
costume, it demands that you move and walk in a certain way. You couldn’t
possibly throw your shoulders forward and slouch if you were wearing the broad
shoulders and deep cuffs of a Restoration hero. You have to hold yourself in a
specific way in order to support the clothes at all.
“For years I believe, I moved quite badly. I think
I always stooped. But there’s something about facing an arduous season at
Stratford – playing rôles like Hector in ‘Troilus and Cressida’,
which makes very obvious physical demands, purely from the point of view of
being credible as a warrior, and Mercutio in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ which of
course involves not only poetry but swordplay – there’s something in that
prospect that makes one consider whether one is sufficiently fit to deal with
it, whether one is taking as much care of one’s physical equipment as one does
of one’s voice. And so when I saw that season coming up in 1976, I did what
actors sometimes do – I went and took a course straightening out and body
building, lifting weights, all that stuff.”
The season also included his notable Edgar in “King
Lear”, a notoriously taxing assignment.
So physical as well as mental and vocal stamina would certainly have been
essential. “Those rôles forced the decision on me. Otherwise I probably would
never have considered taking such a course, but it proved very timely. Actors,
you know, tend to take a very self-deprecatory view of themselves when they
compare themselves with dancers. By comparison we feel slovenly: we don’t train
and we don’t come to rehearsal in the right state of mind or body. When we
rehearsed at Floral Street in London we used to hear them working-out at The
Dance Centre next door, and partly envy them and partly rejoice that we didn’t
have to be like that.
“Actors often feel guilty about all that side of
their work. We think to ourselves that we should be like dancers and have to
do it: every morning so many hours of exercise to keep the instrument in trim.
It’s an overreaction really, but there is a sense in which English actors have
maybe neglected their bodies.”
Vocally, and particularly in respect of verse
speaking, he is inclined to feel that “the familiarity of dealing with the
stuff nudges you towards a certain basic approach to it which becomes second
nature. You learn to find the meaning in Shakespearean verse, and you also
after that learn not to wrench the meaning out of the verse, but to understand
that the verse is there to reflect the meaning very precisely.”
The sound of Shakespeare became part of his life
during his early teens. Born in Cambridge in 1943, he was able a decade or so
later to visit the Old Vic in London at the time when Michael Benthall was
director there. “I was wide open: wide-eyed and wide-eared. I took in quite a
lot of Shakespeare, and I suppose that the musical patterns of the speech had
begun to be recognisable to me. But I was never taught it. I don’t know really
why people make so much of it. Some actors suffer a great inferiority complex
about it. I know excellent actors and actresses who for some reason or other
haven’t done so much Shakespeare, and when they encounter a Shakespearean part
for the first time they’re fearful that they won’t know how to do the verse.
“The whole thing of form and content is ironic.
Dealing with ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, for instance, in which the language is
QUOTE – artificial – UNQUOTE a lot of the time – courtly language, punning
language, very highly formal – there is a temptation, often, to try and ignore
the formal musical patterns of the verse in an attempt to ring some particular
meaning out of a line. The curious thing about doing the play is that you find
after a bit if you ignore rhyme or the metre or the strictly technical aspect
of the verse, you simply cannot understand the meaning of what is being said.
In some odd way, the form makes the content clearer. And often doing the show,
we remind ourselves – or John Barton the director does – to throw the ball back
and forward more. Often when a rhyme is shared between two characters, you must
hear those technical, metrical things, and then you understand – and the
audience will understand – the meaning of the line.”
The lure of Shakespeare's words, to which he
succumbed so easily in the ‘50s, began for Pennington with ‘Macbeth’, as played
at the Vic by Paul Rogers. “It was a very powerful, theatrical, blood-boltered
production, and I responded to it with great excitement. I also saw Richard
Burton and John Neville alternate Othello and Iago: that’s a tradition I would
like to see come back, alternating those two, and Romeo and Mercutio.”
The heady hours at the Vic left him in no doubt
about the kind of work he wanted to do when his schooling was finished. In
fact, a considerable effort of will was needed to keep his mind on the lessons.
“I got over all the hurdles you had to get over, but my thoughts were elsewhere
most of the time. It’s a classic stage-struck story. At some point along the
line that enthusiasm turns into a serious determination to do it, and to do it
well.”
For a short time he joined the National Youth
theatre, which meant that he was playing in London’s West End at the age of
eighteen, albeit in a very small rôle in ‘Richard II’. Then he began studying English
at Cambridge University, and found it necessary to choose between continuing
with the National Youth theatre or acting in university productions. “I chose
Cambridge, because there was more going on – a greater variety. The thing was
that no dramatic society was allowed by university rules to do more than one
production a term, and that production could run for one week only. So the
answer was to form all sorts of different dramatic societies, which differed
only in name but were basically involving all the same people. There was not
only the Marlowe Society but the Cambridge University Mummers and the
Footlights and the University Actors – all these names but absolutely the same
people, doing two or three plays a term, in the manner of a three-weekly rep.
“English was the closest course to take. It was
possible to get through the whole English tripos referring only to drama. You
could even do the French paper by writing about Racine, and the Philosophy
paper by referring to the state of the cinema and the state of the theatre. It
was much the easiest option for me. I don’t know whether I should have got
through, but I did. And I acted in about thirty plays in three years.”
Nevertheless there was no RADA or other traditional dramatic school background to quote when the time came to seek work in the professional theatre. A modicum of luck was needed to augment experience, and it wasn’t lacking. “I was ready to go into rep. and do it the ‘proper’ way. I wrote all the letters in my last couple of terms at Cambridge. But my stroke of luck was that in one term I was able to play both Hamlet and Troilus, which got enough good reviews to prompt the RSC to approach me – this was in Peter Hall’s time. They simply asked me if I’d like to come and hold a spear for a year and a half. So I made that kind of start with the RSC immediately, and while I was there I did a Fortinbras in David Warner’s ‘Hamlet’ – that was the sort of line of part that I got to. I wasn’t really going anywhere, so I left, and didn’t return to the company for ten years, by which time, of course, there was a new directorate.
“ The consequence of all
that was I never did do any traditional rep. Because after I left Stratford I came
to London and my television work started happening, as well as some stage work.
At the time I used to worry about whether I should have been doing those weekly
grinds for a year or two – but I don’t really think it matters in the end. It
was a funny piece of serendipity that caused the beginning of my career to work
out that way.”
His early professional rôles were often
stimulating. The Sam Shepard one-actor ‘Chicago’ afforded him a notable
monologue, as a man whose wife has left him: “very odd and heightened in
Shepard’s own particular way.” At the Royal court in 1971 he was in ‘Captain Jack’s Revenge’
– “that was a time when it was fashionable, and also seemed good, to do plays
about American students sitting around getting stoned in New York and having
fantasies about Indians.”
He was Laertes in the Tony Richardson production of
‘Hamlet’, with Nicol Williamson
in the lead, at the Roundhouse and subsequently in New York and in the film
version; and he played the anthropologist Crawshaw in Christopher Hampton’s ‘Savages’ at the Royal Court and then at the
Comedy in 1973. The following year he returned to the RSC.
His highly praised Berowne in the current ‘Love’s
Labour’s Lost’ has an uncommon reverberation for him. His very first speaking
part during his tyro period with the company was the same character in an
earlier production by the same director, John Barton. “I had been cast as
Dumaine and played that, but I also understudied Berowne, and got to play it
for about two months: a very odd experience in my early twenties. It wasn’t a
happy production and I wasn’t much good. Now it’s really warming to think that
the director has returned to the play after this length of time and done very
much better with it – and I’m glad to be part of that.”
Among his other Shakespearean rôles to date, he has
vivid memories of the fortitude required for Edgar in ‘Lear’: “ Edgar’s a part
that seems to defeat everybody, and it’s also a part that everybody seems to
play on the way to more important things. It has extraordinary difficulties to
it, and playing the Duke in ‘Measure for Measure’ now reminds me of it,
although the Duke is a much better and more satisfying part. The same questions
arise as to the character’s motivation, why he does what he does. A peculiar
man, Edgar: he seems to have a fascination with disguise, which is way out of
proportion. The problem with the part is that it presents all the problems of
‘Hamlet’ without any of the rewards, and it also probably requires the amount
of attention spent on it in rehearsal that Hamlet would, but never gets it
because Edgar’s a supporting part, in every sense: his whole function in the
play is supportive.”
Nevertheless Edgar, if well played, can make quite
an impact, as did Pennington’s, notwithstanding the excellence of Donald
Sinden’s Lear. “But the impact comes mainly through the Poor Tom disguise”,
Pennington believes. “And after you’ve explored it, and tried to work out the
right way of doing it, you come slap up against the fact that he’s only there
as something that further unhinges Lear’s mind. The more you get into the
private fascination of the part, the less well you serve the play. It’s
interesting to do: a long part and very taxing physically, but strangely
unsatisfying because there are too many questions unanswered about him.”
Quite another kind of challenge, and one he met
admirably, was Mirabell in Barton’s 1978 production at the Aldwych of ‘The Way of the
World’. This was Pennington’s first brush with Restoration comedy. “I’ve
always been intrigued by the question of how to deal with something as highly
formal as that, without sacrificing the realities. With Mirabell you find after
a bit that he doesn’t have very many funny lines. Most of the other characters
have the best lines, as far as Congreve’s reputation as a comic writer is
concerned. Mirabell’s tone is much graver and more still: it’s very good and
very distinctive, but he’s not that funny. So that one was resisting the
temptation to make him the sparkling centre of the play, and instead was
actually trying to provide through him a kind of moral focus, and a coolness
and an intelligence which was criticised in some quarters at the time. But I
think that was probably the right way of doing it.
“I think if you made Mirabell as much of a peacock,
as extrovert and as brilliant as the people surrounding him, you’d have no
anchor for the play at all; and his function in relation to Millament is not
that of two brilliant wits competing – it’s a case of a brilliant woman and a
foil, a man who bides his time. Of course he expresses himself well, but his
remarks are not as diamond-like as hers. So we took a conscious decision with
that which, I suppose, if we were to do it again, we might reconsider: I don’t
know, maybe some of the tones got a bit washed out. But fundamentally I think
it was the right interpretation.”
A special ‘treat’ was Mercutio: “The part is a
gift. I didn’t think I could do it when I was originally cast, but it turned
into something which was a terrific pleasure, and I’m reminded of it a great deal
now I’m playing Berowne: they’re two of Shakespeare’s young men, written right
at the beginning of his career, and both rôles have to do with promise,
unfulfilled of course in Mercutio’s case; and then Berowne, a man of
inventiveness and imagination, whose emotional responses lag behind the speed
of his mind. The imbalance between the intellect and the emotions crop up a lot
in Shakespeare’s men, but in a very brilliant and vivid was in those two early
portraits, in the case of Berowne perhaps an element of self-portrait.”
All told, he has made satisfactory inroads upon the
Shakespearean canon, especially for one who was hooked on the Bard in the first
place. One wonders if he would like to be a totally Shakespearean actor, and
never do anything else. But no. “That would be a dreadful thing. Between my two
RSC periods, except for the Laertes for Tony Richardson I didn’t do any
Shakespeare at all. I think I would have been drawn into acting just the same
if it had been Chekhov or a revue or anything. They say that when we come to do
RSC productions of modern works, like ‘Destiny’,
David Edgar’s play about racial politics, the sense of language you develop
through working in Shakespeare helps you in some way. ,I don’t know if that’s
true or not. I do believe the basic rules are the same whether you’re doing
‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ on the one hand or a Howard Barker play on the other,
and I don’t think actors spend a great deal of time worrying about it. I would be
appalled to think that I would only ever do Shakespeare, and I would consider a
season at Stratford very incomplete indeed without an opportunity to work at
The Other Place, preferably in a new play. Otherwise one would be in severe
danger of always thinking in blank verse.”
‘Hippolytus’, of course, is a new play with
classical affiliations. Euripides as translated by David Rudkin would imply a
meeting of ancient and modern minds. “Rudkin’s language”, says Pennington, “is very
particular to him. It’s highly poetic: it’s in no sense naturalistic prose
dialogue. He was very concerned, as a responsible translator, to serve the
original Greek. He used to say that sometimes he felt it a pity that he knew
the original so well, because he had such a great sense of responsibility
towards it. Nevertheless it is a new play.
“It’s a fascinating story. It was only recently,
when I was playing it in Newcastle just before the London season, that I really
thought I’d grasped the rôle. I understand it better. It’s taken a run in
Stratford to get to that point. When I was first offered it I thought it a
tiresome story about a silly uptight young man who likes games and hates girls,
and I didn’t especially want to do it. But now I know that I was wrong about
that. The character has a positive energy and an idealism which I didn’t see at
first. The playing of it is very rewarding, and very taxing as well – it
requires a certain kind of concentration. And it’s physically hard. But I love
it.”
Concentration, one would assume, must be harder to
sustain in the studio environment, like The Other Place and the Warehouse,
whose actors are in such vulnerably close proximity to their audiences. But
according to Pennington, actors embrace that, because it’s so dangerous. “Most
first nights that I remember at The Other Place have gone well, in a way that
main-house first nights sometime don’t. I think the very nearness of people,
and the scrutiny that you’re under, do bring out the best in most of us, because
you have no option but to concentrate.
“And when you’re dealing with something like
‘Hippolytus’, which is a heightened text as well, then obviously you really
have to be onto it. You can’t get away with everything, in other words I like
The Other Place; I think it’s a marvellous space. The roof still creaks a bit,
and there’s still an agreeably makeshift atmosphere. It’s still possible to
make grand entrances from the ladies loo. It’s the kind of environment that
gives us a link with the barnstormers. Of course, budgets go up and that’s
quite right, and things are done in a more polished way every year at The Other
Place, but it retains the sawdust feeling, which is very attractive.”
The resilience of the itinerant player is his as
well. A few years ago the RSC sent him on a tour of Europe and the Far East in
the anthologies, ‘The Hollow Crown’ and ‘Pleasure and Repentance’, winding up
in Japan, whereupon he decided to travel home across Siberia. He has written a
book about the journey, called ‘Rossya’, which
was published last year. “I’d often had a fancy to try and do that train ride,
but of course I’d never organised it because you can’t really travel eastwards
unless you are going there to stay, otherwise what are you going to do when you
get to the other end? So I thought this was the perfect opportunity. There were
three or four weeks before I had to get back, so I did it slowly. The book is a
sort of escapade: I don’t take myself too seriously as a writer.” Nevertheless
if is a noteworthy extra string to a formidable bow.