The Guardian 22nd
June 1984, Michael Billington
“I don’t really approve of one-man shows. In a way there is something very self-satisfied about them. Someone the other day was describing them as ‘the chamber-music of the business.’ If they mean by that an unaccompanied sonata for the ego, that’s about right.”
So says Michael Pennington who brings his own
one-man show, Anton Chekhov, into
the Cottesloe on July 5th (according to some sources, the 80th
anniversary of Chekhov’s death). He has already been touring for some time,
with the help of the NT’s Education Department, around schools, colleges and
small-scale venues.
And he quickly qualifies his attack on solo shows
by saying there are some things you can only deal with in that form. “Like how
a writer writes and how such a solitary figure as Chekhov works. At one stage I
toyed with doing a three-hander between Chekhov, Gorky and Tolstoy because they
all knew one another and had a wonderfully bitchy, schizoid attitude towards
each other. But in the end I couldn’t see any way of describing what Chekhov
was like except by being on my own.”
Pennington (still playing a horse in Strider and a plotting malcontent in Venice Preserv’d) has an
obvious affinity with things Russian. But the idea of doing a Chekhov evening
was not primarily his. “I was on the trans-Siberian Express about ten years ago
coming back from an RSC tour of Japan and I was travelling with an American
poet. I’d taken a Chekhov biography along to read and this guy – now a close
friend – asked me if I realised Chekhov had made the journey in the other
direction from Moscow to Sakhalin in unsprung carriages on terrible roads while
doing a survey of the Penal Colony. I didn’t know that because I had a received
image of Chekhov as a figure in a summer garden.
“Later in the journey, my friend suggested I do a
one-man show about Chekhov. I said it would be an impertinence, an insult, a
stupid idea. We parted and every six months I’d get a line asking how the
Chekhov show was coming along. Two years ago my friend turned up in England and
I put the script into his hands.”
Pennington has plundered the stories (600 in all),
the letters and the endless material about Chekhov in order to give us an idea
of what an evening in the great man’s company would have been like. He now has
five or six different shows in his head that he can vary according to the
venue.
If he’s playing a drama school, he uses a lot of
theatrical anecdotes. Going round colleges, he quotes Chekhov on the lousy lot
of the provincial teacher. For the National he had the idea of Chekhov in exile
in the midst of a world-wide lecture tour, being hauled in by the GB-USSR
association to give a talk and astonished to find an early work of ‘Wild Honey’
was being revived. He discarded that as too self-conscious and says he has come
up with something much more theatrical.
Chekhov (rather like Kipling) once said that he
suffered from ‘autobiographophobia.’ Pennington hopes, however, to give us some
idea of both the inspirational and contradictory qualities of the man. “Tolstoy
said he’s like a girl – he even walks like a girl. And there are wonderful
loopy descriptions of how he used to sit for hours trying to snare a sunbeam in
his hat and of how he would catch a mouse, throw it into the Tartar cemetery at
the foot of his garden and of how the mouse would follow him back.
“Yet he had a scatological sense of humour:
wherever he went the first thing he did was write home to his sister about what
the water-closets were like. And there was a cranky, oddball quality to him. He
hated having visitors but he couldn’t do without them. He could also be
short-tempered, petulant and strangely chauvinistic about women. So I’m not
showing how loveable he was. Simply saying that people respond to him in terms
of how he lived his life. He gets under your guard and I greatly enjoy having
him around.”
Pennington’s own fascination with Chekhov goes back
to Cambridge student days in the early 60s. He remembers fierce arguments about
the relative merits of Chekhov and Ibsen, Stanislavski and Brecht. He also
recalls he and his friends going to see the famous Olivier production of ‘Uncle
Vanya’ and arrogantly deciding it was a travesty because at the end Olivier
spotlit Sonya for her devastating final speech.
Yet the only Chekhov productions he has been in are
a Richard Cottrell ‘Three
Sisters’ in the early 70s and ‘The Seagull’ on radio. He has, however, done
Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman’, Bulgakov’s ‘White Guard’ on stage and television, and
famously Lyubimov’s production of ‘Crime and Punishment’ at
the Lyric Hammersmith. The mere mention of this leads this reflective actor
into something like anger (well justified in my view) with the British
theatre’s xenophobia.
“Lyubimov’s whole showing in Britain has been six
weeks in Hammersmith and a TV documentary about his work. We couldn’t get
anyone to televise the production. We couldn’t get a West end management to
transfer it. Neither the National nor the RSC offered him a platform. Having
welcomed Lyubimov with open arms to the free world and said how terrible it
must have been in Moscow for his work to be censored and often unseen by the
wide public, in our discreet English way we’ve done exactly the same thing to
him.
“Yuri was very hurt and bewildered by it. What was
odd about ‘Crime and Punishment’ was that it belied the notion that you have to
work for 10 years to produce an ensemble because we did it in six weeks. A West
End manager said that it was causing a big stir down in Hammersmith but was not
really being talked about up west. And although we discussed reviving it this
spring, by then most of the actors had got a telly or something. It was very
sad.”
For me ‘Crime and Punishment’ ranks with brook’s
‘Dream’, Hall’s ‘Wars of the Roses’ and, yes, Olivier’s ‘Uncle Vanya’ as one of
the supreme theatrical achievements in my lifetime; and I share Pennington’s
scorn for the twittish local theatre director who wrote to Time Out saying he
could have done just as well given those facilities. But the good news is that
Lyubimov hopes to set up a production of ‘The Possessed’ that will play at the
Paris Odeon in February, 1985, move to Milan and then come to the Almeida in
Islington; and there is already talk of Pennington himself, Simon Callow,
Juliet Stevenson and Harriet Walter being involved.
Appalled by out theatre’s xenophobia, Pennington
also took steps to persuade Ariane Mnouchkine, the sensation of Paris, to do a
Shakespeare production in England. “I’d seen her ‘Twelfth Night’ in Paris and
loved the virtuosity of her company and her application of Kabuki-style
techniques to Shakespeare. I thought it would be wonderful if British-trained
Shakespearean actors could submit themselves to her style of working. But she
said she was too busy.
“The real problem is that the few people who are
seriously involved in trying to get foreign directors over here, like Peter
James, David Gothar and Pierre Audi, usually don’t have the money or resources
needed. Otherwise I think professionally we are rather inward looking and
directors are not eager to welcome highly gifted foreign colleagues. With
Lyubimov, this interpreted itself as a wish that he would go away and not
embarrass everybody with these productions done, in truth, on little money.”
Pennington is a genuine internationalist in a
parochial profession. But he denies that he has any wish to direct, write or
run a company: he would just like the actor’s voice to be heard more loudly in
the theatre’s innermost counsels and for things like the RSC’s Associate
Artists list to be turned into a source of consultation. His own palpable
intelligence (he talks fascinatingly about his trips to the Soviet Union and
says “the more decisive the views people have about the place, the more certain
you can be they haven’t been there”) makes the case better than one or two
recent, breast-beating credos. Meanwhile Pennington prepares to immerse himself
in the character of his adored Chekhov, with just a hint of defiance, “Acting
does fulfil me – because in the end that’s what I’m here for.”