Standard 6th
January 1984
Michael Pennington, a noted RSC Hamlet and hero of last year’s celebrated Crime and Punishment success, is to be found these days in the National Theatre stable – in more ways than one.
The tall, tousled-hair actor was the first man into
the South Bank building one early morning this week, not for mucking out duties
but for the rehearsals of a remarkable new production shortly to be set on the
Cottesloe stage.
Mr Pennington, like most of his fellow actors in
the show, plays a horse.
The play is Strider
– The Story of a Horse taken from Tolstoy’s short story with its vision of
the 19th century Russian class system expressed in equine terms.
Pennington plays Strider, a former famous race
horse now in decrepit dotage who no longer commands the respect of his society,
and rehearsals are this week delicately poised at the point where director
Michael Bogdanov and his 15-strong cast have to decide how the horses will be
portrayed on stage.
Pennington: “We have to find a way of making it a horse’s
world without making it seem ridiculous. It is not going to be like Equus and
it is certainly not going to be like pantomime. It has to be done with touch,
delicacy and feeling.”
It is a neat coincidence which has brought the actor
in Russian vein from Doskoevsky’s classic to Tolstoy’s tale though the country
has long held a fascination for him.
He was in Moscow last year to view Russian director
Yuri Lyubimov’s Crime and
Punishment at the Taganka Theatre before Lyubimov arrived to create his
English language version at the Lyric, Hammersmith.
“That production was exhausting but exhilarating,
especially when we got the response we did from the public. I lost three stone
to play that role because I knew how I wanted Raskolnikov to look, and Lyubimov
also insisted he should have a savage profile.”
He is preparing a Chekhov-based one-man show at an
NT platform but the further future remains unknown to him.
“You can’t plan a career these days. It used to be
the case that once you get to Hamlet you could have an expectation of playing
other such roles but now fashion plays too big a part of casting. Even at the
RSC you can feel you are out of fashion.