Heady challenge of touring on the grand scale
The Times, 18th
September 1986
Private enterprise
in Britain’s theatre took an imposing step forward with yesterday’s
announcement of the founding of the English Shakespeare Company: Michael Bogdanov
and Michael Pennington talk to Andrew Rissik about their collaboration in the
new venture.
It is a mark of this country’s changing theatrical climate that actors and directors of established ability seem these days to be seeking freedom from the huge organizations which they have helped to create.
Sir Anthony Quayle, who ran Stratford in the
Fifties, now leads a touring company called Compass, whose speciality is
high-standard productions of the classics. John Dexter, once a corner stone of
Sir Laurence Olivier’s regime at the National, has recently joined forces with
the veteran impresario Eddie Kulukundis to form the New Theatre Company and
stage ‘The Cocktail Party’. Yesterday the director Michael Bogdanov and the
actor Michael Pennington announced the establishment of their English
Shakespeare Company, which will take ‘Henry IV Parts I & II’ and ‘Henry V’
to the Old Vic early next year after a four-and-a-half-month tour of 11 of our
leading repertory theatres. Bogdanov directs and Pennington plays Hal.
Both of them have done much of their most rewarding
work with the big, subsidized companies. Pennington played Hamlet at the end of a
seven-year career at Stratford, before joining the National in 1984 to take
leading roles in ‘Venice
Preserv’d’ and ‘Strider – The Story of
a Horse’, Bogdanov directed ‘Strider’, has been an associate director at
the NT since 1980 and won the SWET award in 1979 for his RSC ‘Taming of the
Shrew’.
He first directed Pennington at Stratford in 1980,
when the actor played the working-class Dublin poet Donal Davoren in Bogdanov’s
flinty and muscular production of Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’.
Since then they have talked often of consolidating their partnership more
formally.
They recently considered offering themselves as a
team to Sir Peter Hall, but the English Shakespeare Company emerged first, the
results of a series of meetings with the Arts Council and the Mirvishs at the
Old Vic. To some extent the choices have been made for them, determined by the
wishes of their backers, who seem to have been excited by the prospect of two
experienced Shakespearians able and willing to take large-scale productions on
tour.
Both lay claim to long-nurtured ambitions to do the
Henry plays, and the scale of the project, with all its difficulties, appear to
offer them an adrenalin-drawing combination of fear and excitement. “To
rehearse three plays in nine weeks must register as the balmiest repertory
schedule of the year”. Pennington says, with a faintly combative smile. “One of
my interests is to see if this can be done with a minimum of bureaucracy.
Everyone’s in all three plays, everyone’s playing as cast, everyone’s
understudy. That’s a familiar attitude to running an ensemble, but in 20 years
I’ve seen it more talked about than practised.”
“We regard this not as a radical breakaway project,
but as a rather conventional one”, Bogdanov adds. “We want a company that isn’t
tied to buildings – something like the large-scale experimental groups that
exist in Europe.”
They acknowledge that their partnership may seem a
curious one. It is easy to characterize Pennington as a bookish, sweet-spoken
classicist, and Bogdanov – who directed Howard Brenton’s scandalously received
‘The Romans in Britain’ – as a racy and sharp-spoken iconoclast. But, Bogdanov emphasises,
“I think, looking at the way we’ve developed over the last few years – me
wanting to break with the more traditional forms of theatre, and Michael
breaking away brilliantly and radically from the RSC with Yuri Lyubimov’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ –
there’s more in common than might appear.”
“When I first worked with Michael on ‘Shadow of a
Gunman’ I thought we’d all be riding around on monocycles”, says Pennington.
“Instead, I found he challenged me on every single naturalistic detail of my
performance.” Bogdanov replies: “What I
saw during those rehearsals was an actor battling to come to grips with a part
he wasn’t necessarily designed for. Struggling with the social background and
the accent. That strength and determination to get it right was what impressed
me.”
Both men may be undervalued in their different
ways. Pennington’s work has sometimes seemed too reverent, while Bogdanov has
often been thought too crude, an energetically opinionated director who lacks
subtlety. At his best, though, he has flair and a visual panache rare in the
English theatre. At the National, his ‘Hiawatha’ and his ‘Ancient Mariner’ were
wonderful pieces of theatrical story-telling, stark, bold and charged with the
heady magic of imagined words. Pennington, too, has a capacity for the haunted
and the fantastic. It dominated his skeletal Raskolnikov, his half-mad
politician in Brenton’s ‘Thirteenth
Night’ and his persecuted and slow-moving horse, Strider.
It is easy to see why they want to tackle the
‘Henry’ plays. The epic flux of society, the picturesque sprawl of nation in change,
is Shakespeare at his most searchingly political. And Harry Monmouth, the
layabout prince who becomes the Warrior King, is the longest and most complex
role in the canon. Pennington speaks for both of them when he says simply, “In
the end I think we just share a terror of boredom”.
The English Shakespeare tour begins at Plymouth
(Theatre Royal, November 3rd - 15th) and Cardiff (New
Theatre, November 17th-22nd).