Michael
Pennington on Acting and Directing Shakespeare
Shakespeare
Bulletin, Summer 1997, An Interview with Margaret A Vannell
Michael
Pennington is no stranger to the Shakespearean community. He is a respected
actor, director, and author. He is also known as the co-founder of the English Shakespeare Company with Michael Bogdanov.
Apart from the ESC’s two visits to Chicago International Festival in 1988 and
1992, Pennington is perhaps best known to American audiences as a guest
director of ‘Twelfth
Night’ for the Shakespeare Repertory Company of
MAV: There is an ongoing debate
about university-based vs. drama school preparation for the theatre. What is
your experience?
MP: I graduated from
We
are facing a kind of crisis in the theatre today. Acting is a craft and, as
such, should be served by a proper program of apprenticeship or training – just
as any other industry should. And that is a point that we have been unable to
establish with governments and government agencies, who claim to appreciate the
achievements of British theatre but, in practice, regard us still as rather
frivolous people. They see us as people who want to train for our work but who
are not really deserving of bursaries or grants to do it. As a symptom of that,
like anybody who is established in an industry, I get lots of letters from
students who find that they can secure places in accredited drama schools but
can’t afford to pay the fees. They go, as they always have been taught, to
their local authorities; in the old days, you could expect a grant. Now they
find that the authorities have a limited budget, and they can’t get a grant.
So, the next thing they have to do is write begging letters. I must say that
are auditioning twice. They audition for the drama school, and then they
audition to see who can write the best begging letter.
Of
course, it would be impossible for me to subsidize all the people who write or
in a sense to subsidize any of them. You really have no notion about whom you
are subsidizing and whether they have a chance of succeeding or not, the whole
question of arts training in this country is a vexing one. It is very difficult
to persuade the people who should be representing our interests in Parliament.
It we are going to continue to be proud of what we do in the English theatre,
then those same politicians who want to have good evenings in the theatre for
the rest of their lives are going to have to take care of those coming up in
the training ground. Otherwise, there will be decline in the standards. No
matter what the industry, a certain kind of technical training or experience is
still an investment in the future.
MAV: How do you approach a
text?
MP: To some extent, it
depends on the director or the style I am working with. I was brought up on
Shakespeare, so I fortunately have a good working knowledge of all the plays,
and that is completely different from someone who might come to the material
fresh. It is difficult to generalize how you approach a text. You look for the
sense of it. You explore it as you would a contemporary text. Either at the
same time or possibly in a secondary stage, you begin to appreciate, as you
would a piece in Mozart, the structure and the form from the outside. For
example, why he’s placed one word at the end of a line rather than in the
middle of the line. But, of course, as with Mozart, you find very quickly that
the more you pay attention to Shakespeare’s form, the more certain matters of
interpretation become clear to you. The clues are actually all in the sequence
of the words on the page and the order Shakespeare has chosen to put them in.
MAV: What was it like
directing in
MP: I work fortunate to work
in a great theatre city. Barbara Gaines founded her Shakespeare Repertory
Company about ten years ago. Gaines and her people are clearly doing remarkable
work. Not least because she is presenting a lot of the little known plays of
Shakespeare, plays that we are nervous about doing over here – for example,
‘Timon of Athens’, ‘Troilus and Cressida’, and ‘King John’. That’s a brave
commitment. Like many directors of companies, she doesn’t have a permanent
troupe, but she has a pool of actors that she can draw on again and again. So
there is a kind of nucleus of an ensemble.
As
for working with the actors, they had an expectation of me, and I had an
expectation of them. They had the expectation that I would perhaps be this
rather pedantic teacher of the verse form. I think they found that I was as
concerned about establishing the comedy business in ‘Twelfth Night’ and make
people laugh as any vaudevillian. In a way, I was expecting what, in fact, I
did find – that most of the actors had easy access to their emotions. They were
very willing to laugh, cry, or do whatever was necessary – easily and without a
lot of coaxing. To generalize, the challenge was to harness the emotion and
give it a form that corresponded to the form of Shakespeare’s writing. That
meant paying attention to the rhythm, flow, the tension and release of the
verse as well as to the structure of the whole sequence of scenes.
It
was a gift for a director, because without the actors’ emotional reservoir and
their willingness to take risks and expose themselves emotionally, it would
have been hard to get the work on. I enjoyed the experience immensely. I’ve
directed ‘Twelfth Night’ now three times, once in England, once in Japan, and once in America, and the
last was by far the best.
MAV: Why is building an
ensemble important?
MP: It has become an ideal
that we take for granted here. When I say an ensemble, I don’t necessarily mean
the same group of people and only that group of people who work together for a
year or even five years at a time. In the early sixties here, we heard about
the Russian ensembles, and we became excited about the idea. Peter Hall tried
it in
The
RSC has traditionally had a group of sixty or seventy actors to be drawn on,
but not all the time and not for every play. Peter Hall is trying to establish
that kind of environment again here at the Old Vic. There really are two
reasons. There is something for the audience in watching the same actor play
three parts in a week: it is an incidental pleasure. And it has always been so.
We have always had jokes about the actor whose landlady comes to see him every week,
and she is pleased because he is always the same in every play he does. There
is a whole vocabulary of jokes, but there is something that appeals to
audiences about it. From the actor’s point of view, it means that a good actor
does get to play, say, the lead in ‘Othello’ but that, to do so, he has to play
a small part in another play. What you get is very good actors even in the
small parts. You enjoy a depth of quality in a company, which is extremely
valuable for any theatre group. I personally don’t think it is good for the
same people to play together exclusively, all the time. I think they begin to
turn inwards. I suppose that makes me the typical Englishman. I think the
camaraderie is good, but I also think the market forces need to keep breaking up
a company from time to time.
MAV: The English Shakespeare
Company is still alive and well. What are they doing now?
MP: I’ll tell you what’s
happened. We started in 1985. I resigned from the directorship, which I shared
with Michael Bogdanov, in 1992. There was at that time a brief hiatus. He kept
the company going from 1993 until now. It has done primarily educational work,
which is something that had grown during the previous seven years of the
company’s life. And it is as vital as anything we did. We are proud of our work
going into primary and secondary schools and inspiring and enlightening kids
who had never really had any dealings with Shakespeare or who were already
bored with the way Shakespeare was taught. We got them to perform the plays and
work with the text, the kind of work you would expect us to do. Recently,
Michael to his great credit, has mounted the company again as a touring
operation. The company is currently on the road doing ‘A Midsummer Night’s
Dream’ and an adaptation of ‘Beowulf.’ So we are waiting to see how that goes.
I am now a just a member of the board, so I have no direct artistic input, but
the company still exists and thrives in its work.
MAV: The first years of the
ESC were trying.
MP: The first year was difficult
because we were so new, and I suppose wiser counsels would have said you must
wait twelve months or so until you have more grant money in place and you are
fully organized. But we weren’t of a temperament to do so. The first three
years were the most successfully artistic we had. People got very excited about
the cycle of history plays we were doing. The whole thing was an administrative
nightmare. We worried whether we could pay the actors at the end of the week.
Later on, we did become a little more established and more secure financially.
I’m not sure the work was any better, but, from the start, we wanted to take
risks and fly by the seat of our pants, so to speak. It was tremendously
rewarding artistically.
MAV: What about Equity?
MP: Equity did give us a bit
of a hard time in the first year. We were doing an unusual thing. We did nine
performances a week, and we had the trilogy days when we did the whole cycle of
history plays. So, there were a lot of technical problems. We had to decide how
to manage appropriate breaks between performances, how the overtime was to be
administered. Now companies like the RSC and the National do this type of work
all the time. But they have established their own separate contracts with
Equity, and it had taken years to do it. We were new. We were working under
bits and pieces of various contracts cobbled together. We hadn’t had time to
negotiate the details, and there was some friction.
MAV: Were you a threat to the
RSC and the National?
MP: Well, we should have
been. We were a reproach to them. They had abandoned large-scale touring of the
classics. So we were actually flinging the gauntlet at them. Five years later,
they took up the gauntlet and started larger scaled national tours again. Of
course, at a certain level, we can’t compete with them. They always had first
call on the money, and they got it.
MAV: Let’s talk about nerves.
MP: Opening nights are
wonderful but trying. It is difficult for an actor to do his best on an opening
night, because a lot of pressure comes down. I deal less well with it as years
go by. You must instruct yourself to get through it. Like Laurence Olivier’s
comment: “Nerves are a luxury you can’t afford.” He knew that nerves actually
close a performer. It really is just a point of moral instruction to your self.
Nerves are a point of ego really – you just have to get on with the play and
serve the story. Opening nights vary, but it’s unusual for an opening to be the
best performance. Sometimes, the opening has the adrenalin, but the rhythm of
the play usually hasn’t happened yet.
MAV: Reviews?
MP: We all read reviews,
maybe not at the time, but eventually. Bad notices? Well, you hope there are
good ones to go along with it. In any case, you have to keep the faith in
yourself going. It is also stupid to turn your back on criticism, to say these
people don’t know anything. I have learned things from bad reviews. Maybe they
were right. Maybe, when they said you missed the character, you should think
about the criticism. But it is difficult not to be defensive.
MAV: What about Harley
Granville-Barker?
MP: Granville-Barker was way
ahead of his time. When he looked at stage practice in the early part of this
century, he saw it was marked by excessive spectacle and unbelievable styles of
acting. His mission, if you will, was to change all that and put the text
foremost, and he was very successful. Granville-Barker abandoned the
academicism of building the Globe theatre again, but he perceived how the text
could be used, and he seemed to be recapturing something of what Shakespeare’s
intention was. His prefaces are about the only text the practitioner wants to
refer to. Academic critics are useful; but, quite honestly, you don’t have a
lot of time to study them as you are preparing for a play. Granville-Barker was
a practitioner. He understood the nuts and bolts of the plays in performance.
He is quite useful to an actor or director today. The last preface he wrote was
in 1947, which was a long time ago. I am not necessarily saying it should be
me, but someone should be writing about these plays practically and not just
theoretically.