Hamlet: A User’s Guide
Sunday Telegraph,
A hit, a very
palpable hit!
Michael Pennington has played Hamlet five
times and Hamlet twice. In other words he’s been in five productions of the
play, in three of which he has appeared successively as Fortinbras,
as Laertes, and as Claudius-doubled-with-the-Ghost.
But he started at the top, playing the prince in a
With all that to go on, he has written a book:
Hamlet: A User’s Guide (Nick Hern Book, £18.99). he describes it as ”a kind of owner’s manual. I’m offering no
views on whether you should have left- or right-hand drive or what colour the
model should be, but I know the push-bang-suck of the engine by now and how the
distributor works – perhaps also which passages call for pure brake-horsepower
and which deft cornering.”
I suppose I have read, or pretended to read, car
manuals that were as knowledgeable as Pennington’s, but I have never come
across one that was remotely as witty, or as charming. He goes through the
play, scene by scene, analysing action, pouncing on character detail, outlining
(though, as a matter of policy, never resolving) ambiguities, in fact
rehearsing the play on the page. Occasionally he offers modest suggestions
about staging. He makes selective but illuminating use of theatre history. Acknowledging
that it sounds “hubristic”, he places the book in the line of Harley Granville
Barker’s famous Prefaces to Shakespeare. He might also have referred
back to a slightly earlier and even more celebrated critic, the Victorian A.C.
Bradley, who said that his method of dealing with a Shakespeare play was to
approach it as if he were an actor studying all the parts. That’s what he
said. Pennington seems actually to have done it. He’s as illuminating on
Gertrude, Polonius or Ophelia as on the parts he’s actually played.
Unexpectedly perhaps, the book doesn’t go in much
for autobiography. What there is occurs in his introduction and footnotes,
which are amongst the best things in the book. (“Some kindly people in
I’m not sure whether Pennington’s five on-stage
encounters with Hamlet constitute a record, but I would like to stake a small
associated claim of my own. I have for reasons educational, recreational or
vocational seen every one of them. As an undergraduate two years his junior, I
saw his student Hamlet. I even reviewed it, for a short-lived university rag. I
don’t remember much of what I wrote (and, to my chagrin, he hasn’t got it
locked in his memory either) but I’m sure it was mostly favourable. I remember
it as a lively, sympathetic and – I’m sure I used this word – conscientious
performance, one that made sense of every line: not a quality to be taken for
granted among amateurs or professionals. I know I called it “the most
intellectually exciting performance” I had seen at
These days he also directs. At least he directs one
play. He did Twelfth Night for the English Shakespeare Company, the
maverick touring company he ran with Michael Bogdanov,
and he then did it again in
So with all this activity, surely he must be an
intellectual actor? In fact the idea makes him shudder. “I hate it. I
never function intellectually as an actor. I’m not an analyst in rehearsal.”
Nor, I suspect, would he care to think of himself as a romantic actor, an
Establishment actor, or an English-gentleman actor (“I’m a Celt. My mother was
a Scots girl, my father was Welsh”) though his fair hair and gentle, melodious
voice have often typed him this way. Some canny directors have reversed or
tilted the image. Peter Hall had him play Fortinbras,
to David Warner’s Hamlet, as a blond Fascist beast. His Laertes,
with Nicol Williamson, was directed by Tony
Richardson to have an incestuous passion for Marianne Faithfull’s
Ophelia. Whether for that reason or another, his grief at her grave was
unusually convincing.
After all the unkempt Williamsons and Warners, Pennington was cast by John Barton in
I can’t say that he actually got it. Like most
Hamlets, rough or refined, he wound up with the audience’s sympathy. It’s built
into the play, for aesthetic rather than moral reasons, as Pennington says
himself, “Hamlet has your inner ear.” Actually one of the best things about the
book is the balance it keeps between the intolerable Hamlet and the
irresistible. And the larger contrast it draws between the apparent faults of
the play itself (“it seems impossible
for a production to make the play frame the man and the man belong to the
play”) and its overwhelming virtues (“galvanic force in the theatre, an ability
to heal, and an effect on an audience unlike any other I know”).
He actually wrote it while playing Claudius, keeping himself busy
while touring (Leatherhead to
The Hall production did keep in all the plotting,
and Pennington’s Claudius emerged as the best I’ve ever seen: also possibly the
best performance of his career. He started with an impeccable façade (some of
the details seemed to have been borrowed from the public persona of Sir Peter
himself) which eroded, slowly but remorselessly, from the first stab of
acknowledged guilt. As his desperation grew, so also did his borrowed majesty.
It was also a perfect demonstration of the area where, in the actor’s own
words, “sympathy collides with moral shock”.
Pennington’s introduction to the classics was
classic. At the age of 10 he was “dragged very unwillingly” to see Macbeth
at the Old Vic and was hooked. It wasn’t, he admits, quite as neatly revelatory
as all that; he already “loved reading Shakespeare in class” and the Macbeth
was “striking a bell that was already there”. The Vic was working its way
through the entire canon, and he had seen nearly all the plays long before he
left school. It’s the stuff that educational fantasies are made of, though it
may be statistically likelier to produce critics than actors. It perhaps
contributed to the traditionalist image that has dogged his career. People were
surprised when he teamed up with the iconoclast Bogdanov
to form the ESC, and even more so when he played a markedly unsentimental Henry
V in the cycle of the history plays that defined the company’s style. It might
have been called eclectic-brutalist, though the
eclecticism embraced some conservative aesthetics as well.
Pennington recalls that “it was very cheeky what we
did”, challenging the National and RSC on their own repertoire and beating them
hands down at the touring game, home and abroad. “They couldn’t fault us on the
verse-speaking or the editing. But we weren’t regarded generously by the
theatre Establishment.” The ESC cast new actors in leading roles but, though
they won high praise, it didn’t seem to lead to much success elsewhere. “My
regret is that we didn’t change more careers.” He doesn’t regret having packed
it in after eight or nine years, proud though he is of what they achieved. As
an actor-manager he found that he ran into “the same crises every year – and
always at the same time every year. And I didn’t enjoy chasing money. I became
physically tired. I won’t do it again.”
Towards the end of the book Pennington refers to
actors playing Hamlet as “part of the logic that almost outmoded thing, a
‘classical career’. His own Stratford Hamlet happened that way, even his
Cambridge Hamlet may have been a conscious first step on the road, but as he says,
“to decide now at 21 to be a Shakespearean actor would be regarded as
eccentric”.
He does have a new Shakespeare part coming up:
Shakespeare himself, in a radio play by Don Taylor. And he still has ambitions
for Timon, Lear and Prospero. But what he most wants
to do now are new plays. (He’s actually done more of them than he lets on:
Shaffer, Stoppard, Pinter, Brenton, Harwood, David Edgar.) He also has a one-man show on Chekhov. And
though all actors these days write books, his is exceptional.
The
“Here’s the full text of an
article I wrote for the Herald (Glasgow) which was published in edited form on
13th February. It’s a combined review of Michael Pennington’s
‘Hamlet: A User’s Guide’ and an interview with Tom McGovern who played Hamlet
at the Royal Lyceum,
Whenever
we put together kitchen units, wire up a hi-fi or load up a new computer
programme, we have no hesitation in turning to the manual for help. Yet when
you put together a production of a play, you’re left to piece the bits together
pretty much by yourself. Even when that play is one of the most frequently
performed work in the English language – as is the case with ‘Hamlet’ – there
is little opportunity for one performer to pass on those useful tips about how
the thing works, what the best way to treat it is and what to do when the
warrantee runs out.
True,
there are endless shelf-loads of academic treatises on the work of Shakespeare,
and Hamlet, in particular, but your average actor, operating from the heart not
the head, tends to be suspicious of anything born in the privacy of the study
instead of the limelight of the stage. Very belatedly the world of drama
studies has come to realise that scripts need to be understood in terms of
performance not in terms of literature, but it is still the case that the bulk
of an actor’s learning is done through stage experience not through solitary
study.
There
is, however, a middle line and it is one that actor Michael Pennington has
struck in his book, ‘Hamlet: A User’s Guide’, published last week. Here is just
such a manual to help you piece together the nuts and bolts of Shakespeare’s
tragedy, written not from the airy perspective of a university professor, but
the practical viewpoint of a performer who has appeared in ‘Hamlet’ five times,
twice in the lead role.
He
knows it inside out. And he knows it in a way that is, for all his perceptivity
and insight, fundamentally down-to-earth. This is an artisan’s analysis –
certainly not above warning the prospective director against cutting a scene in
case he should lose its emotional resonance, but just as likely to recommend a
cut for the pragmatic reason that without it the show will run to half-past
eleven.
In
short, it’s something any actor – and indeed any audience – could learn from,
achieving the considerable feat of sharing a lucid and practical understanding
of the play without imposing a directorial vision or standing in the way of new
imaginative interpretations. He does this with a clear-sighted admiration for
Shakespeare, celebrating the playwright for his unerring dramatic instinct even
while he picks apart the logical inconsistencies of the plot. Take this on
Gertrude’s speech after the death of Ophelia: “The hoary old question – why
didn’t she save her instead of watching her drown? – is best left in the Green
Room, since we know by now that Shakespeare will sacrifice anything for a good
speech. A modern playwright wouldn’t get away with it.”
Pennington
isn’t above the quest for knowledge – on the contrary, his book is rich in
historical facts and background information – and he has managed, despite his
familiarity, to remain sensitive to and enthusiastic about Shakespeare’s
innovations, like the unexpected positioning of the coarse grave-digging scene
immediately after the suicide of Ophelia. His reference points are wide – he
gets the ‘Oresteia’ and ‘The Lion King’ into a single sentence – and his advice
is sound – “These are beautiful lines that should not be spoken beautifully,”
he warns at one point.
And
what comes across most forcefully is just how much the character of Hamlet
affects the actor who plays him. Of course, the appeal of the play is
widespread. Even now, Robert Lepage is developing a
one-man version in
That’s certainly a sentiment confirmed by
“From
the day I was asked to do it, my life wasn’t the same,” he says. “I just
couldn’t get him out of my head. I had copies anywhere I might be – at my
mother’s, my mother-in-law’s, my sister-in-law’s.It
was like being given something to take care of. I cared so much about him, I
felt more like a friend of his even before I started rehearsals. In drama
school you’re always talking about degrees of getting away from yourself, and I
think it’s about as close as I ever got to being another person.”
Finding
parallels with the early death of his own father, McGovern found himself
closely identifying with Hamlet’s unresolved relationship with the old king.
And from before rehearsals began, the part crept its way into all aspects of
his life. “I t managed to envelop you even in your dreams,” he says. “My dreams
were phenomenal prior to it, during it, and after. I was having dreams about my
father being in it as the ghost! My wife said I was often reciting in my sleep.
I had one awful dream when I was doing ‘To be or not to be,’ and someone in the
audience started laughing, I just lay down on the stage and I woke up crying.”
As
many actors have testified, the part takes you far beyond personal
identification, and by the time it came to returning home to
It’s
a continual source of fascination that this one role, unlike any other, can so thoroughly
absorb an actor. Quite how it could be so is a mystery whose answer must lie
somewhere in the enigmatic character of Shakespeare himself, a man Pennington
describes not only as “a gifted tart, scraping a theatrical buck,” but also as
a writer who “anticipated both Samuel Beckett and bepop”.
All life is in ‘Hamlet’, and a considerable amount of it finds its way into
Pennington’s wise and entertaining book.
Night and Day,
If anyone should know what Hamlet is about, it’s
Michael Pennington.
Despite Pennington’s protestations, this is a
scholarly piece of work. The fact that it is written from a performer’s
pragmatic point of view, giving us a blow-by-blow account of the play from ‘a
soldier call Francisco stands on guard’ to ‘the lights go down on Hamlet’,
makes it all the more valid, and definitely of more use to students than many
of the other dry pieces I remember having to plough through for A-levels.
There are some great quotes too: ‘This is a
medieval revenge story severely compromised by Renaissance humanism’ would
surely merit at least a B-plus in anyone’s GCSE. Although I’m not so sure
whether describing Hamlet’s madness as ‘an unrewarding search for eccentric
dress and funny voices’ would go down quite so well with the curriculum police.
I did feel that occasionally Pennington sailed
dangerously close to the winds of pretension. ‘What can a man say about his own
Hamlet? and ‘At the Gielgud,
meanwhile we laboured away amid the rats, the tarts and the urine’, raised in
me the giggle of a not entirely good-company member. But probably this was just
a bit of bad old Jasper-Jealousy on my part. Nobody has ever asked me to play
the Prince, and so I have never had the opportunity to discover, as Pennington
has, that ‘playing it changes you for good, and for the better’.