The Guardian, 27th
January 1978
Hard on the heels of the National Theatre’s bawdy
‘Country Wife’ – and you can be very hard on Restoration heels which were
blocked high and gaily coloured – comes the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new ‘Way of the World’
by Congreve at the Aldwych (press night tonight and running till the end of
March). The RSC’s Mirabell is Michael Pennington, last year’s admired Mercutio, who hinted at John
Barton’s angle on Congreve when he said that the audience needed to remember
the society for which Congreve was writing – vicious, divided and dirt-ridden.
“They used to empty their slops in the middle of the street.”
It would be surprising if the RSC were out to
overturn the new orthodoxy about Restoration comedy established by William
Gaskill’s ‘realistic’ ‘Recruiting Officer’ which got away from ruffles, swishy
dialogue and pirouettes in favour of showing the pockmarks beneath the patches.
But the predictably trendy sociological approach has not entirely dominated
Barton’s thinking. Pennington says: “Although a realistic approach and
Stanislavskyan approach to the text is in no way excluded because it’s
Restoration comedy, when you look at our costumes there’s no getting away from
the kind of glamorous style, bright colours and all, that we associate with the
period.”
It will be Pennington’s first Restoration play
(although the word Restoration seems rather approximate for a play written in
1700) and he is very conscious of the work’s status as “a famous language play
full of lines you recognise.” The hardest thing in rehearsals has been getting
the plot, which seems inexplicably complicated, clear. “But it’s hard to say
what I think about the play as a whole because just now I’m more interested in
getting the dance right.”
Pennington, who is 34, joined the RSC much the same
time as Ian McKellan to play Angelo in ‘Measure for Measure’ – a
profoundly unpopular production by Keith Hack. Then he spent a year touring
‘The Hollow Crown’ around the world on what he calls a long leash. Like
McKellan he was at Cambridge – read English at Trinity from 1961 to 1964. Like
McKellan he never went to drama school, but used Cambridge as a springboard
into the professional theatre, in the same way as he had used Michael Croft’s
National Youth Theatre as a springboard to university theatre. He says: “I’ve
stopped debating whether it would have been better to go to drama school or do
the university thing. Cambridge meant doing 30 plays in three years all before
an audience, which I certainly wouldn’t have got at drama school.”
After Cambridge, and a well-reviewed Hamlet, he was
taken off by Peter Hall for a season at Stratford where he carried a spear and
played Fortinbras and Berowne
in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ Then followed a steady nine years in and out if
television with a larding of West End roles in plays like John Mortimer’s ‘The Judge.’ “I never did any rep –
apart from a single play, ‘The
Promise’, at Sheffield. No, I’ve never done that particular part of what
you’re suppose to do to become a good actor.” And he has never starved, barely
ever been out of work, so for him at least the RSC is not a safe harbour after
stormy waters.
Pennington does not regard himself as particularly
tied to the RSC. He says: “I’ve always regarded myself as a freelance or
eclectic actor who liked working for cameras almost as much as for an audience.
The odd thing about the RSC in its present very successful phase is that you
can do almost anything without leaving the company. You can even do a little
telly if you’re lucky. But I’m heretical about permanent companies. I would
hate the idea of working with the same group of people for more than five
years. I love to work with different directors, different actors. It’s true
that the worst thing that could happen to me would be not be able to work. But
I have a sort of super optimism about that. As for this particular company, I
feel the point of break-up may not be very far away. We are all familiar,
well-known to each other now. It may be time to stop, maybe in a year, soonish
anyway.”