Pennington back in fold
Michael Pennington is back in the fold of the RSC and got the company out of a bit of a hole when he agreed to play the title role in ‘Timon of Athens’. Not too long ago, though, he was revelling in being a thorn in their side.
Michael Pennington was at the
theatre – it was actually the interval during a performance of ‘The Phantom of
the Opera’ – when he got an urgent phone call.
It was Greg Doran, associate
director of the RSC, and he had a serious problem. It had just been agreed
between himself and Alan Bates, some weeks into rehearsal, that Bates should
withdraw from the role.
He had been ill, Timon was a
demanding part to play and Bates was already committed to the equally demanding
role of
“Would you be interested in
playing Timon of Athens?” asked Doran (in his account of events). “We are
already two weeks into rehearsals, I’m afraid.”
“It’s not impossible,”
replied Pennington coolly. As long as he could move one or two things around,
and not simply mimic Bate’s interpretation of the part, he would give it a
shot. And now, if Greg didn’t mind, he had to get back into the auditorium to
watch a friend who had just taken over one of the roles in the Lloyd Webber
musical.
So it was that Michael Pennington
and his last minute heroics became one of the talking points of the new RSC
season.
“He was absolutely amazing,”
recalls the director. “There came a point, two weeks in, where we could have
stuck to the original press night and previews because he was so fantastic. There
was a point where I stopped saying, ‘Michael is very good considering….’ and just
started to say that he was very good.”
The modest, quietly spoken Pennington
remembers things slightly differently, insisting that he still had three weeks
left in which to master the part. “We did cancel a couple of previews and put
the press night back.
“It was still very loose when
I joined the cast and I think there’s always some sort of unspoken agreement
that if something like this happens, things can be reworked to a certain
extent. Greg was very good and sat down with me and said it was all up for
negotiation.”
The thing about ‘Timon of
Athens’, an unfamiliar Shakespeare play which doesn’t sell itself in the way of
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ or ‘Twelfth Night’, is that much of the burden
falls on the actor playing the title role.
Nobody could sleepwalk
through it as a top flight actor could, at a pinch, if playing Bottom or
Malvolio with oodles of easy laughs to smooth the way.
Timon is on stage virtually
all the time so there is a prodigious number of lines to learn.
Midway through the play, the
naively generous Timon undergoes a complete personality change when he realises
those he has helped are prepared to cold shoulder him now he is no longer rich.
Consequently the actor
playing Timon spends much of the latter part of the play half naked and covered
in grime and dirt, and railing at the world from a hole in the ground. Take that
on board and you can understand the note of temerity in Greg Doran’s voice when
he made that desperate phone call.
Pennington was helped by
familiarity with the play, if at some years remove. “I was in the last Timon
the RSC did on the main stage in 1965.
Paul Scofield did it. Goodness that was 34 years ago. I was in it as a spear
carrier.
“I became fascinated by the
play even then. It is a wonderful, neglected piece with some of the most
glorious language in it. I knew even then I would like to play Timon some day
and this was too good a chance to miss, although I decided I would do it as
long as I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself.
“Funnily enough, I thought I knew
it rather better than I actually did. I remembered the shape of it rather than
the details and, as soon as we started rehearsing, my memories of that earlier
production started to fade away.
“Part of this game is killing
your idols and finding your own way with a piece of work, and that is what
started to happen to me.”
So Michael Pennington,
one-time spear carrier on the edge of a stage dominated by the great Paul
Scofield, made the role his own, going on to win thoroughly respectable
reviews.
“A stirring performance that
makes you yearn one day to see Pennington’s Lear,” wrote Michael Billington in
The Guardian.
Michael Pennington is, of
course, a very fine actor, a Premiership replacement for Alan Bates whose name
is better known only because of his films.
After his début RSC season in
1964-66, Pennington returned regularly between 1974 and 1981 playing leading roles in ‘Love’s Labours Lost’, ‘Romeo & Juliet’, ‘King Lear’, ‘ Measure for Measure’ and the
title role in ‘Hamlet’ in
1980/81.
But he came to many people’s
notice when he founded the English Shakespeare Company
with Michael Bogdanov, bringing Shakespeare to Sunderland Empire in the early
days with an ambitious, Falklands War-inspires production of ‘The Wars of the
Roses’ fashioned from Shakespeare’s Henry plays.
Explaining his motivation for
establishing a theatre company, with all the heartache that involves, he
recalls a time when he would rather have done anything in the world other than
Shakespeare at
“When this came up I didn’t
hesitate. It feels a lot like coming home. But I can remember beginning to have
dreams of being stuck in a
At about that time it dawned
on him and Michael Bogdanov, another boat-rocking figure who had done good work
with the RSC, that the Stratford-based outfit – its
The English Shakespeare
Company proved a point, winning new audiences for its exciting though tightly
budgeted productions of Shakespeare, and Michael Pennington showed he could be
director and impresario as well as actor.
But nobody is sorry that he
has thrown in his lot once again with the RSC.
Shakespeare’s ‘Timon of
Athens’ is not the greatest play in the canon but Michael Pennington’s
performance in the title role is one of the best of the 1999 season.
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