Stage and
Television Today, 3rd July 1980, Ann Fitzgerald
Four days before the first preview performance at Stratford of the RSC’s new production of ‘Hamlet’, Michael Pennington projected the controlled tension and subdued excitement of an athlete waiting for the starter’s gun after months of concentrated preparation.
He knew definitely that he would be playing Hamlet
last autumn but since he joined the RSC in 1974 there has always been a “strong
implication that it might happen.”
He hasn’t let the idea obsess him – there have been
plenty of other parts to tackle, notably Mercutio, Edgar, a performance with which he was
personally disappointed, Hector
in John Barton’s production of ‘Troilus and Cressida’, the Duke in ‘Measure for Measure,’ a role in
which he made an outstanding contribution to Barry Kyle’s production, and
Berowne in ‘Love’s Labour’s
Lost.’
Outside Shakespeare he made a Mirabel of real grit,
working for John Barton again, in ‘The Way of the
World’, and he has particularly enjoyed his work at The Other Place, in
David Edgar’s ‘Destiny’ and Rudkin’s ‘Hippolytus’.
They have all been a challenge but he admits there
is a particular pressure to playing Hamlet because it has been singled out as
the serious actor’s Everest and “you come to it knowing you are that much under
the critical spotlight”.
He admits to “dismay” when news broke of the Royal
Court’s production earlier this year.
“I couldn’t possibly begrudge it to Jonathan Pryce
but it had added a further gladiatorial aspect to the already heavy pressures”,
because, “to see another interpretation at the stage when my own ideas are
beginning to crystallise would be very dangerous”.
His approach to playing the part has been very
subjective. “Hamlet if such a riddle, such an enigma, that I can’t get anywhere
by saying he is primarily this kind of chap or that. I can only say what this
set of awful bombshells that happen to him at the beginning of the play do to
me as a person, and take it from there”.
When he is not working, and that isn’t often at the
moment (apart from Hamlet he is also playing Donal Davoran in ‘Shadow of a Gunman’
at The Other Place), Michael Pennington retreats to the seclusion of a rented
flat above the stables of an old manor house eight miles out of Stratford.
The estate, 100 acres of parkland, woods and lake,
belongs to an American whose desire to own a bit of Shakespeare’s England
provides Michael Pennington and also Jane Lapotaire with a much-needed haven in
the midst of two very hectic careers.
“But it’s not always been like this,” says Michael.
“ I was out of work plenty of times before I joined the RSC. It is really since
then that the good parts have kept coming.” And that’s why he has remained with
the company for six years. Although he doesn’t intend to become “part of the
bricks and mortar”, he does enjoy the philosophy of teamwork on which the RSC
is founded, rather than mounting star vehicles.
What next after Hamlet is a question he can’t duck
for too long. The part is bound to be a watershed and probably time to get out
and do something different afterwards. Films beckon strongly for they’re still
untried territory though Pennington has done a lot of TV work.
But first his most fervent hope is that Hamlet will
prove to have a long mileage in it, one of those satisfying productions which
will grow and deepen over many months of playing. “I should like it to reach a
really wide audience not just in the big theatres of Stratford and the Aldwych,
I’d like to think it has enough flexibility to go on a small venue tour as
well”.
Pennington doesn’t know, though, what the cost of
playing the part in physical and emotional terms will be. “I might be totally
shattered by Christmas or in a state of high exhilaration”, he says and there
is a flicker of anticipatory fear and excitement at the prospect of finding
out.