The Independent 8th
March 1997, John Walsh
When Michael Pennington was just 11, he was taken
to the Old Vic theatre in London – “dragged there”, as he now recalls, “because
I knew it was going to be boring” – plonked in a seat and told to watch Macbeth,
as impersonated by Paul Rogers. The effect was amazing. Countless early
Bardophiles have said, as he now says, “It changed my life”, but in
Pennington’s case it’s literally true. It was like Ruth Lawrence being giver
her first sum, Ryan Giggs encountering his first spherical object, Mozart
hearing B flat major in his cot. Pennington went to the next production (John
Neville in Richard II) and the next and….”They were doing all the Shakespeares
here in 1954, so by the time 1 was 14 or 15, I’d seen the lot. It thrilled me.
But it was completely unbrainy. It was sexy”.
From that day, Pennington has devoted the major
part of his life to the works of the Avon swan. If his name and face are not as
well known as his classical peers (Ian McKellan, say, or Alan Howard), it’s
because he has remained so grimly true to the stage. His career suggests a man
in the grip of an obsession, drenched and drowned in Shakespeariana. He played
Hamlet in a student production when at Cambridge in 1964, and went directly
from university to Stratford, has played every Shakespearean male lead except
Romeo, co-founded the English Shakespeare Company in
1986 with Michael Bogdanov, the well-known critic-abuser, and toured their epic
conflagration of the history plays all over the known world under the title The
Wars of the Roses. He’s written a book
about the ESC, and a notably convincing and sensitive study called Hamlet: A User’s
Guide. Without actually changing his name to Will, and acquiring an
Elizabethan ruff and a pointy beard, it’s hard to see how Mr Pennington can
more forcefully express his interest in our finest poet and dramatist.
He’s also been at pains to reinterpret the Bard for
new generations and complexions of theatre audiences – the young, the working-class,
the criminal, the Third World, the disadvantages…”The best Twelfth Night I ever
saw,” he explains, “was in a school production at Westminster, because the
innocence of the performing was wonderful. And though its heresy for an actor
to say this, the ESC did a production of The Tempest in Maidstone Prison, with
two professional actors and a cast of lifers, which is easily the best Tempest
I’ve ever seen. It’s a play, of course, that’s centrally concerned with freedom
and imprisonment. Sometimes the crudeness or amateurishness of the playing
affects me more than any more sophisticated treatment can. Just as the
Shakespeare canon I saw in the mid-Fifties, though it was probably crudely
done, and we might curl our lip at it now, it probably comes closer to the
blood and thunder of what Shakespeare really is…”
Hmmm. Does Mr Pennington come across as a little
too evangelical, as the kindly vicar surveying the amateur dramatics society
and muttering “Ah, bless them…”? That wouldn’t be right. In the flesh, he seems
with affectation, an unusually clever, thoughtful and articulate chap, none of
which adjectives can generally be applied across the acting profession. His
days as a dashing romantic lead (fair-to-blond curls swept back from the
handsome face and mile-high forehead) have crept past, leaving him, at 53,
looking a bit lean and shrunken, his sharp eyes hooded by Garfield lids. His
drily musical, Alec McCowenish voice is accompanied by a lot of graceful,
actorish hand gestures, but nothing that would prompt a rebuke (“And do not saw
the air thus…”) from Polonius. He is the very model of a professional actor,
dependable and competent but perhaps less disposed towards passionate risks
that heretofore. And thus he seems the right man to play Henry Trebell, MP, the
lead role in Harvey Granville Barker’s 1926 play Waste, which kicks off
the Peter Hall rep company’s new season at the Old Vic next week.
He has, of course, played dozens of non-Bard roles
in his career (Chekhov is a speciality). But committing himself to Sir Peter’s
rep for a long season – he will also be appearing as Trigorin in The Seagull and Sir John Brute
in Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d
Wife – is a statement of intent for Pennington. It means he’s back in
town, distaining television and movies and touring and even Shakespeare,
committing himself to the open stage and expanding his range of roles. “I do
count myself lucky to have done all the Shakespeare,” he says, “but I’ve always
been a character actor by instinct, a disguiser, rather than a self-promoter.
When I first went to Stratford, I was always saying ‘I don’t want to play the
student or the lover, can I play the guy’s father or the tractor hand or
something?’ “. He is proudest of having hoofed and sung as Archie Rice, the
“saloon-bar Priapus” in Osborne’s The Entertainer at the
Hampstead Theatre. And he was pleased with the huge risk of Strider: the Story of a Horse, at the
National, in which he played the eponymous equine, getting inside the role by
spending two gruelling hours a day learning prancing and dressage at the barre.
And now there’s Waste,
a drama with reassuring Shakespearean ambitions. It’s politics vs idealism, in
which Henry Trebell, an independent MP and intellectual superman, is wooed into
a new Labour government and promised a seat in Cabinet on the understanding
that he will steer through Parliament a bill for the disestablishment of the
Church of England. But the repercussions of an affair with a loose-cannon
married Catholic woman start to wreck everything, even when the Prime Minister
tries to smooth it all over. It’s a very wordy, brittle and Shavian piece of
work, in which everyone talks political shop, everyone schemes in tuxedos and
very long sentences, and the air is thick with moral trimming.
“Barker is as good as Shaw I think,” says
Pennington, “line by line and scene by scene. He hasn’t any of that vanity and
show-off quality that Shaw has. And I think I understand why he’s not as big as
Shaw; it’s because his writing is so…chaste. His political arguments are
very thorough. He doesn’t stop halfway through with a joke, as Shaw would. He
doesn’t simplify. He asks that you listen.” He gave a small sigh, “and he’s
provided the least commercial title of the century. Shaw would have called it
‘A Statesman and a Scandal’ or ‘Too Pretty to be Good’, or something…”
The role of Henry - a smarter 1926 Cecil Parkinson
– is hard to get in focus: he’s a man who is, by turns, astute, unworldly, passionate,
reclusive, a cold fish, a ladies’ man, a political visionary, a political
pragmatist…Pennington rises to the challenge by playing him with near-permanent
crinkly-eyed grin which only cracks when someone yells in his face. I said I
thought he was miscast. Did he have a clear sense of Henry’s character?
“I’m getting there. It’s not as simple as it looks.
The thing is, Barker breaks one of the rules of drama, which is that a
character should be just as he’s described by everyone else. But before he
comes on, they all say, he’s such a solitary, he hates women – and first thing
you see of the guy is when he’s literally charming the knickers off a society
girl.”
The ‘girl’ is Felicity Kendal, all flapper threads
and coquettish wail, whom the text requires Mr Pennington to kiss several times
with impetuous, let-me-devour-you enthusiasm. How had he come to terms with
snogging the nation’s sweetheart every night? “I must be the luckiest man in
Britain,” he gallantly replied. Did they have a bilateral no-tongues agreement?
“I think tongues are cheating when it comes to stage kissing,” says Pennington
seriously, “because the audience can’t see it…But playing love scenes is daft
anyway. I’ve got away with it all these years – I’ve never had to take my kit off.
And now I’m too old for anyone to want me to. But for girls, well – you simply
won’t get through your career without having to do it, if you’re halfway
pretty…”
Back to the play. What is the “waste” the title
refers to? Is it personal or political? “It’s a play about a man who’s
incapable of joining in. He’s 51, he has beliefs and convictions, but he’s too
proud to join in. he’s never married, never had a family. Then two things
happen: he gets fired up over a political issue and joins a government; and
suddenly the idea of parenthood is offered to him. Then both things are
abruptly taken away and the loss – the two wastes – are enough to destroy him.”
Pennington, so adept at teasing out motivation and
latent passion in Shakespeare, is frustrated by Granville Barker’s impermeable
surface. “If it was Ibsen, there’d come a point when a great fissure would open
up in the text and all this emotional lava would come out. But Barker never
allows you that. I asked Peter (Hall) at the beginning: ’How do I show what
he’s really feeling?’ You look for the place where it falls apart and you can’t
find it.”
Had he met many politicians? “I sat beside Virginia
Bottomley once,” he said with evident distaste. “She came to see a play I was
in, called Taking Sides
and we went to the Ivy (restaurant) afterwards. At the end she said, ‘What do
you want me to do, now I’m at Heritage?’ I remember pitching in with some
things I feel strongly about, like the fact that students can’t raise grants to
train for the theatre anymore, and have to write begging letters to people like
me. All she would say was, ‘Ah, but I believe drama schools are charging too
much anyway’ which rather misses the point. What struck me was, she spent most
of the time in devotional posture, with her hands on the table before her. It
was only when midnight struck that I realised she’d been looking at her
wristwatch all evening. And at midnight on the nail, she left.”
Was there a little unconfessed anger here? There
was. It was about the L-word. “It was when I heard her talking about this
fairly harmless proposal of Blair’s, to spend some Lottery money for some form
of grant for actors and she described it as a ‘Luvvies’ Charter.’ “ Pennington
practically smouldered in front of me, like Coriolanus or Henry Trebell finding
a cause to fight against. “It’s truly hair-raising that she can express herself
in this was and not care how unpopular she’s going to be among the constituency
she’s supposed to be looking after.”
Pennington’s combative streak has surfaced at
several points in his career – when globetrotting with a theatrical troupe,
having blazing rows about the provision of cooked breakfasts, and when
resigning from the English Shakespeare Company five years ago, after suffering
the death of a thousand cuts at the hands of the Arts Council (“I threw my
resignation on the table in the middle of a board meeting, stormed out and rang
The Independent…”). Today, he’s past all the actor-manager histrionics, the
travelling Shakespeare show that was the Wars of the Roses. He lives in
Highgate and is extremely cagey about his private life: “I’m a single,
heterosexual bachelor” is all he’ll volunteer to the press. Noting his strong
paternal streak, I asked if he’d had children and yes, “I’ve a son of 30 called
Mark, a very good illustrative photographer. I’m going to be a grandfather in
April. Mark is living in my house in the country in Oxfordshire, so I’m
dreaming of lots of grandchildren running about under the apple trees…” How
sweet to encounter such a fond prospect of retirement. But, as parts go, it’s a
bit on the quiet side for such a connoisseur of passion, such a cautious
observer of wasted lives.