The Sunday
Telegraph, July 1980, Daniel Farson
To be asked to play Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon
must be one of the really big achievements in the life of any rising actor. At
the start of his ten weeks of rehearsing, Michael Pennington, 36, was already a
man apart, with the rather exalted loneliness of a contender training for a
record attempt. He soon found everyone expected him to be different and
wondered if he should be seen brooding on the banks of the Avon, having what he
calls “a fit of the Hamlets”.
By the end of the year Pennington will have played
the Prince in front of 100 audiences. His entire life is likely to be absorbed
by the part for the next two years. Hamlet has already cost him the chance to
play the lead opposite Meryl Streep in Karel Reisz’s film of John Fowles’s
novel ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, with possible stardom and a fee of
something like £40,000. His Royal Shakespeare Company salary slightly exceeds
£300 a week.
But Pennington has no regrets about his choice. “I
realised I couldn’t let go. It is one of the prizes.”
The quest may be said to have started one night at
the Old Vic when he was eleven years old. His family had no theatrical
tradition. His Welsh father was a Chancery lawyer until his semi-retirement,
since when he has been a legal adviser to Shell, and his parents took him along
just for the experience. The play was ‘Macbeth’, with Paul Rogers. “My life
changed that evening,” says Pennington. To his parents’ amazement and slight
dismay, he thereupon insisted on seeing every Old Vic production. “By 15 I knew
almost the entire canon.”
At Marlborough College, where acting displaced
earlier dreams of starring at sports, he once played Prospero in a hired cloak
allegedly worn by John Gielgud. “I was tremendously proud till I realised so
many others had worn it since then that there was practically nothing left.”
At Cambridge he played in no fewer than 30
undergraduate productions in three years, spending so little time reading
English at Trinity that he was relieved to achieve a Second Class degree after
four weeks’ cramming. He never went to drama school, but was taken on straight
away for spear carrying at Stratford, where he stayed for two years. “I felt,
presumptuously perhaps, that I was ready for greater things after that.”
It was at Cambridge where he was born, that he had
his first shot at Hamlet, in a university production. “I was 20 and very
intense. I thought Hamlet was going to be nervous-breakdown material but found
I really enjoyed it. I suffered grievously in the next production – ‘Hay
Fever’!”
Since then he has played Fortinbras to David Warner’s
Hamlet in 1965, and Laertes to
Nicol Williamson’s in 1969 at the Round House – a production which transferred
to New York and was then made into a film. He is, in fact, fascinated by every
aspect of playing the part.
He wonders if when it was first played it was
regarded as the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s career, or just another play to be
added to the repertoire. He envied the thought of those fresh audiences who had
never seen the play before.
Michael Pennington says the role itself is such an
enigma that he will have to play it as an extension of his own personality.
That personality is not easily probed. The first impression of him is one of
reticence, and this remains.
He is a private man, the least actorish of actors.
For nearly two years he has been living with Jane Lapotaire, of ‘Piaf’ fame,
and an atmosphere of easy domesticity pervades their ground-floor flat in St
John’s Wood, which also accommodates his son Mark, 13 (by his marriage, now
dissolved, to Katherine Barker), and her son Rowan, seven.
While Jane Lapotaire was running up curtains on her
sewing machine he spoke of his son as “a pal” and told of Rowan’s spontaneous
gesture while passing the Royal Court recently. The lad stuck his tongue out
and plugged his ears, because this was the home of a rival Prince of Denmark.
Among the theatrical posters and framed cartoons in
the sitting room was a display card for a book which Pennington prepared and
published himself. “I went to Japan with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1975
and came back slowly. This is ‘Rossya’, my diary
of those days.”
The book was a labour of love, a curious mixture of
a few blurred photographs taken by himself, his diary of the journey and
several illustrations by his fellow RSC actor Roger Rees. Various publishers
rejected the book and Pennington decided to publish it himself, even choosing
the paper and arranging for the typesetting. The first print of 1,000 copies
sold out at the bookstalls of the RSC and the National Theatre, as did a
reprint.
Though Pennington went straight to Stratford after
leaving university, he left after two years in search of greater risk and found
it in such unclassical parts as the rebellious lout in Stephen Poliakoff’s ‘Pretty Boy’. He has directed his own adaptation of
Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ in a one-man show at Newcastle which lasted for two
performances, but he thrilled to the experience of “flying alone”. Back at
Stratford, he played a 60-year-old National Front sympathiser in David Edgar’s
‘Destiny’ and had the traumatic
experience when he finished his make-up of staring at his father’s reflection
in the mirror.
There was an arid patch in Pennington’s career at
the start of the seventies, but in 1974 he rejoined the RSC and moved
successfully through increasingly challenging parts – though he remembers
drying up once after 200 performances of playing Mercutio in ‘Romeo and Juliet’. He had to
skip six lines before he could carry on.
Looking back on his climb to the top he believes
that he was prickly and haughty, obsessed with billing. “I hope I’m friendlier
now.”
The criticism which pleased him most was when he
was compared to a footballer: “the Kenny Dalglish of the classical theatre –
quick on the turn and deadly accurate”; and the one which hurt was a review for
his portrayal of Angelo in ‘Measure
for Measure’. Describing him as a “soiled Prince Charming hot foot from the
actor’s studio”.
There is a chameleon quality to Pennington’s
appearance. Sitting he seems slight and short but he becomes a startling
six-footer when he stands. With his fair curly hair he has the secretive looks
which many women find magical, and the inevitable question arises of whether
his Hamlet will be a return to the great romantic tradition. John Barton, his
director at Stratford, declines to comment on the interpretation, beyond a
laconic “It is time to restore the balance.”
He was much more forthcoming on Pennington’s
talent, though, describing him as “equipped for the classics – he has
intelligence, voice, sensitiveness, sensibility. A very fine actor.” He paused. “I have great faith in him. He’s
the person I most wanted to do ‘Hamlet’ with.” Barton has waited a long time
for the right actor, and this ‘Hamlet’ will be the first at Stratford’s main
theatre for ten years.
Preparing for his great test, Pennington stays 15
miles outside Stratford – “Jane, myself, the boys and the latest au pair seem
to spend most of out time on the motorway.” He lives above the stables next to
a stately home called Admington Hall, whose gardens have just been opened to
the public.
There is a magnificent cedar, a pond, and acres of
rolling countryside. The estate is owned by an American, cheerful and charming
as he stops to talk, telling Pennington he has fixed up a corner of the garden
which be ideal for sunbathing – “We can’t have the Prince of Denmark looking
too pale!” he says airily.
It is a label Pennington cannot avoid, but he knows
how lucky he is. “Some actors never get the chance at all. In the old days an
actor would have several goes, but now the profession’s too overcrowded.” Also,
he feels this is the right moment. “I simply wouldn’t have been ready before.
But it has to be done now.” When the American producer Joe Papp suggested
Britain had no young classical actors left, Pennington was cited in refutation.
Inevitably his closest friends are in the
profession, yet he enjoys going to the cinema rather than the theatre itself.
“Occasionally, in a fit of conscience, I spend two or three weeks seeing
everything that’s on, but it’s a busman’s holiday. I look forward to it
greatly, but find I don’t really enjoy it all that much. I like to walk and
read, but at the moment I’m rehearsing 14 hours a day, with the exception of
Sunday – a horizontal day when I do nothing but rest. It’s a hard graft.
All the same he concedes that his must be the most
exciting time of his life. “I came here first when I was 15 and queued all
night to see the plays. So when I saw the first yellow ‘Hamlet’ poster go up
outside the theatre I did feel a frisson, I must admit.”
Jane Lapotaire is to star in Shakespeare too – as
Cleopatra in a BBC production. Can Michael Pennington ever expect another year
like this one?