Radio Times 20-26th
October 1984
Actor Michael
Pennington has had a long-standing fascination with the life and work of
Chekhov, which will be explored in a film on this week’s Omnibus. He talks to
Michael Billington.
Strange things happen on trains. Ten years ago actor Michael Pennington was on the trans-Siberian Express from Vladivostok to Moscow, after finishing an RSC tour of Japan. During the journey he fell into conversation with an American poet, professor and Zen expert, Lucien Stryk.
Noticing that Pennington was reading a biography of
Chekhov, Stryk suggested that the actor do a one-man show based on the great
Russian dramatist.
Pennington initially pooh-poohed the idea but,
after much chivvying from his chum, finally unveiled his solo Chekhov show at the National
Theatre this July. Out of that experience, and the crucial train encounter,
stems Keith Cheetham’s impressionist ‘Omnibus’ film, ‘Pennington’s Chekhov’.
Pennington had admired Chekhov’s plays since his
Cambridge university days. But he admits that without his strangers-on-a-train
meeting he would never have got his show together. “Lucien’s suggestion had the
value of surprise. It was he who told me that Chekhov had, in 1890, made the
trans- Siberian journey in the opposite direction – from Moscow to Sakhalin –
to report in the terrible conditions in the penal colony there.
“On the other hand, Lucien had also written a poem
called ‘Chekhov in Nice’, about how the writer used to go to the South of
France and gamble voraciously, according to a supposedly foolproof system. I
learned about Chekhov the sociological missionary, and Chekhov the decadent
pleasure-lover, and all this dented my image of him as a white-suited figure in
a garden.”
Stryk sowed the seed; but it took time to
germinate. In 1977 Pennington published his own book
about the trans-Siberian journey. Five years later he played Chekhov in a Granada documentary.
He then started to delve urgently into the mound of letters, short stories
(over 500 in all) and Chekhov biographies, to come up with a stage show that
would give an idea of what it was like to spend an evening in the great man’s
company.
“I didn’t,” says Pennington, “want to do one of
those boring biographical one-man shows on the lines of ‘then next year I
painted the Sistine Chapel’. I simply wanted to bring Chekhov to life, and
evoke his presence in a way that made you feel you could interrupt. I suppose
his genius lay in his ability to see the universal in the particular. He wrote
about the fact that people play cards, choke on their cabbage soup, drink too
much vodka, have headaches, and are always in a state of emotional turmoil. In
one of his stories he says, ‘people have dinner. That’s all they do. They have
dinner and during this time their happiness is established or their lives are
falling apart.’ Chekhov saw the drama of the ordinary.”
Michael Pennington denies any mystical
identification with Chekhov, and underplays his supposed obsession with things
Russian (last year he played Raskolnikov in Lyubimov’s shattering stage
production of ‘Crime and
Punishment’, and was a piebald gelding in the National’s version of a
Tolstoy short story ‘Strider’). Yet he
talks about the pleasantly large postbag he received after doing his Chekhov
show – bigger even than when he played Hamlet – and says that on good
nights in the theatre he had an uncanny sense of Chekhov’s presence.
“On the very last night an odd thing happened, when
he’s describing his own death and the figure of the black monk who comes to
haunt him. He says: ‘A light wind blew in from the sea, sending my papers to
the floor.’ At that precise moment in the Cottesloe – which is a hermetically
sealed theatre – a breeze blew in from somewhere and scattered the papers on my
desk. I felt maybe one had for in touch with something numinous, which is
lovely. Anyway, it’s a good story to dine out on.”
But, although Pennington claims there is an element
of serendipity and chance about his involvement with Chekhov, he falls back on
a lone of Olga’s in ‘Three Sisters’ to make his point (‘Life never turns out
the way you expect. I didn’t mean to be a teacher but I am a teacher’). And the
‘Omnibus’ film explores the undoubted kinship between actor and writer.
Lucien Stryk has come over from the States to
reconstruct the train encounter. Extracts from Pennington’s book are juxtaposed
with Chekhov’s account of his own trans-Siberian journey in an unsprung
carriage. And sequences from the stage show confirm Pennington’s ability, in
his pince-nez, linen jacket and striped trousers, to get right inside the
character’s skin.
Seeking to escape Slav typecasting, Pennington has
recently turned down the chance to appear in Lyubimov’s stage production of
Dostoevsky’s ‘The Possessed’. “I think if I do another Russian tragedy,” he
says, “I and everyone else will go barmy – I want to find myself a modern
comedy in trousers!”
Yet, in conversation, he has that blend of
life-hunger and introspection that marks out Russian characters; he passionately
argues that it’s sentimental to worship 19th-century Russian writers
without visiting the Soviet Union, and he talks animatedly about the prospect
of a second and third Chekhov show using new material. “I’d like to think he
had a character audiences would keep coming back to for years and, in my wilder
fantasies, I imagine a Chekhov day or even a weekend.”
So Pennington’s Chekhov may be with us for some
time yet? “I’m afraid so,” he says with a huge gusty laugh that might have come
from the mouth of a Russian peasant in one of Chekhov’s own stories.
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