Michael Pennington:
Sweet William
Cottesloe Theatre
programme notes,
“If
Jacques is right about the Seven Ages of Man, then having spent my first in
routine mewing and puking, the second was not so much as the whining schoolboy,
but as a thoroughly narrow-minded adolescent, so blown away by Shakespeare that
very soon he had seen and read most of the plays aloud. So it was to my own
satisfaction, unthreatened by any audience, that I had by age 15 played everything
from the Bawd in Pericles to Old Adam, from Titus Andronicus to Falstaff’s Page
– which I suppose has saved a lot of time learning the lines later. Perhaps I’ll
do some of them this afternoon.
As
for the Third Age, I was the lover al right, sighing like furnace over Mercutios
and Richard IIs and Berownes,
the great young lyricists I did at the RSC; and I went on to the military
Fourth, it was as a hardened campaigner battling to assert my own views through
my own company, the ESC. Just as in a war, this was
when I really started to learn something; from playing in Richard III in East
Berlin in 1989, towards the end of the Honecker
regime, to an appalled silence, as if the sight of Richard’s iron fist gleaming
inside his velvet glove was a daily fact; from finding that directing a
Japanese actor as Toby Belch in Twelfth Night exorcised his
instinctive dislike for English writers and directors that he had thought was
permanent since the War; or from helping a 10-year-old boy play Juliet’s father
in a London comprehensive and being amazed at how he suddenly understood the
pain of being middle-aged.
Shakespeare
brings us together, with each other and ourselves, and the fact is that I’ve
been around the block several times with him, from
As
for the man himself, he just keeps on rolling; he’s more popular than ever. Renault
and Levi’s use him to advertise new cars and 501 jeans. His words have been
co-opted by politicians of every complexion – a desperate measure, since after
all he never speaks for himself. Who knows how many books about the plays are
published every year. I’ve done three myself, and my
publisher says I’ll be able to do all 37, which only shows he has no sense of
time. The M40 announces Warwickshire as his county. We, the television and the
newspapers quote from him, knowingly or not, most days.
So
although he needs little help from me, this show represents where I’ve got with
him so far. As for the Sixth and Seven Ages, please watch this space.”