Michael Pennington talks to Robert Cohen
Michael Pennington died on 7 May 2026. This interview from March 2012 is reproduced exactly as it first appeared in Plays International.
Setting out as a spear-carrier at Stratford in the 1960s, Michael Pennington has become world-renowned for his work with Shakespeare. He has played Hamlet, Angelo, Mercutio and Timon (among many others) for the RSC, produced and acted in the spectacularly epic The Wars of the Roses cycle for his own English Shakespeare Company, and this summer [the run was in September 2012] will be starring with Kim Cattrall in Janet Suzman’s Chichester production of Antony and Cleopatra. For the past five years he has also been touring a one-man show about Shakespeare entitled Sweet William. Drawing on an abundance of extra research material, Pennington has now expanded that show into a book which, he says, contains “everything that I think I know, guess, surmise, feel about the man and his plays”.
Robert Cohen: Last time we met, when you were rehearsing Coriolanus for the ESC with Michael Bogdanov, you told me, “The more I work on Shakespeare’s plays, the less I know what he was like or what he really believed in.” That was 22 years back. Do you know him any better now?
Michael Pennington: No. No. What drives people crazy — and this is why the whole authorship controversy continues to pulse away — is that we know a lot about his property deals, we know where he lived, we know how he came and went — but what we want to know is the one thing we have no evidence about: we want to hear him say, “God! It was hard to write King Lear”, or “Richard Burbage is being a pain in the arse” or something — and that’s the bit we don’t have, there’s nothing, not a word, about how he worked or what his theatre company was like, or any gossip of any kind.
But what would we know? How could we find out anything that finally illuminates Antony and Cleopatra? How can that be explained? How can A Midsummer Night’s Dream be accounted for? It’s a sort of miracle, really.
RC: Your love of Shakespeare shines out from every page of your book, Sweet William, yet you also rejoice in highlighting his less glorious moments — “Oh, Posthumus, alas, where is thy head?” being one of the stand-out citations. It’s an acknowledgement that even The Bard has his off-days.
MP: Yeah, that makes him much more human — I mean his terrible love of the pun, for instance — and he can’t resist a dirty joke. I don’t think venereal disease is particularly funny, but he finds it interminably funny. But I was conscious of doing a sort of rearguard action — “What can I dislike about him?” — because actually all that is overwhelmed by the glories.
RC: Most writers tend to have motherlodes of fascination for particular issues. What would you say are Shakespeare’s major themes?
MP: There’s all this father and son stuff, and indeed father and daughter. The families always seem to be incomplete. There’s no Mrs Lear, there’s no Mrs Gloucester. Conversely there’s no Mister Volumnia in Coriolanus.
RC: You get the sense that they’ve been single parents for a long time.
MP: Yes, he doesn’t seem to feel the need to refer at all to a third party. Now, that — single parenthood is not his life, but it obviously was a subject that he found extremely rich as material. He’s drawn to marriage too — he’s very rarely critical of the institution of marriage, he tends to see it as the ultimate harmoniser, and since what evidence we have of his marriage doesn’t suggest that it was particularly close or happy (this may be quite wrong), you wonder about that, maybe it was some kind of wish- fulfilment — though the idea that writers write out of personal compulsion or to salve their wounds in any way is post-Shakespeare, it’s a romantic idea, really.
RC: I was fascinated to discover that two decades before you toured The Wars of the Roses with the English Shakespeare Company you were in the Peter Hall productions at Stratford.
MP: Yeah, that was my first job: 1964, it was already the second year of it, and I joined as the eighteenth spear-carrier from the left, straight out of university — I mean two days out of university — light years away from getting a line to speak certainly. The company was about 65 or 70 people, the size of an opera company in those days. There was a big chart in the rehearsal room — it would say under your name, with the names of the scenes down the side, “Scene 1: Lancastrian soldier”, “Scene 2: nothing”, cos you were changing, “Scene 3: Yorkist soldier”, “Scene 4: nothing” cos you were changing, “Scene 5: Lancastrian soldier” — you were constantly changing your clothes. Essentially it was fodder, y’know, cannon fodder. But what I did was watch: I watched Ian Holm and David Warner and Peggy Ashcroft and Donald Sinden for a year. And then I got a second season out of it when I did play some small parts like Fortinbras in David Warner’s Hamlet, and I thought maybe I was going to be there for life — Ian Holm started with a spear in his hand and ended up playing all the leads. But I didn’t quite cut the mustard that time, so I had to go, and return 10, 15 years later. It was a sort of baptism of fire but I was proud as punch of it.
RC: What did you learn from institutions like the RSC in terms of running a company which you were able to draw on when you came to set up the English Shakespeare Company with Michael Bogdanov?
MP: Well, quite a bit. But the fundamental difference, and therefore what I couldn’t learn about, was that we didn’t have a building to run. We were light on our feet, we could plan quickly and we could adapt; we didn’t have the overheads of a building. The other huge difference was that the RSC was run by people who could, at the end of a rehearsal, go upstairs and disappear behind their office doors; whereas I had to go on stage in the evening with what I liked to think of as my colleagues, sometimes at times when the management i.e. me, was not that popular. I learned a lot about how unreasonable actors can be. I learned the producer’s point of view — budgetary, every other way, and why it’s tough being a producer.
RC: In a sense you got some idea of what it was like being Shakespeare, being an actor in your own company.
MP: Yeah, I suppose, though he wasn’t— Actually, he was paying everybody, wasn’t he, because he was one of the shareholders of the theatre, so he was management. I’d never thought about that before. It must have been a complicated relationship. It’s difficult to be the boss and a colleague, there’s no question about that.
I remember the tour of Coriolanus. What you were doing was asking a group of actors to tour from September to March or April, schlepping up and down the country week in week out, and it was made up for by the fact that we always had a London season at the end of that eight months, and that of course was why a lot of people joined. Anyway, I think it was a month before we were going to bring Coriolanus into the Old Vic, we were on tour in Bath and I got a call to say the Old Vic had pulled out. So suddenly we didn’t have a London venue, and I remember sitting in the dressing-room in Bath thinking, “What am I gonna do?” Bogdanov was somewhere else at the time. So I planned a company meeting for 24 hours later, and meanwhile I just sat on the phone to every producer and theatre-owner I knew in London, to see if they had a vacancy and could take us. Michael Codron, thank God, who owned the Aldwych at the time said, “Yeah! You can come to us, we do have a gap.” So I was able to do a piece of incredible showing off, going to the company the next day and saying, “First, we’ve lost the Old Vic.” — Groan! — “However, I’ve been busy these last 24 hours and we’re now going to the Aldwych — the home of Shakespeare, much better than the Old Vic, far more history there, far more redolent of great traditions”, and of course I was the hero of the hour. But it wasn’t a pleasant 24 hours. We learned to ride on the edge of a sharper precipice than the big national companies.
RC: Do you think the work of the ESC has been influential on those who’ve come after?
MP: Yes, particularly the modern dress aspect. Of course, it had antecedents as well in the work of Tyrone Guthrie in particular. I felt that Bogdanov’s gifts were akin to Guthrie’s. I think Guthrie would have approved of the troops heading off to France in Henry V like football hooligans — “‘Ere we go, ‘ere we go, ‘ere we go.” As to what’s happened since us, Shakespeare is invariably in modern dress or in alternative periods: sometimes it’s done wisely and carefully, sometimes it’s just chic.
What I’ve never seen done since we did it, or not so well, is the kind of mixture of periods not only in the production but within a single scene. I remember some of Hotspur’s scenes in Henry IV, Hotspur looking like Bonnie Prince Charlie — romantic rebel — and the guards in his tent in contemporary combat fatigues —the real violence — others in almost medieval clothes, i.e. chivalry; in other words dressing for character and putting all the images blatantly into a single scene. And we were also surprisingly lyrical — in Henry IV we spent hours on that delicate scene in which Lady Mortimer sang to her non-Welsh-speaking husband on the harp. Almost my favourite scene of all.
RC: Despite the slings and arrows of co-running your own company, you later attempted to jump headlong back into management with the top job at the RSC.
MP: Yes, it was about 10 years ago. Various friends and colleagues in the organization said, “Why don’t you apply? You’ve run the ESC, you know how it works.” So I did, and I was amazed to be given the welcome that I got. As part of the process there were strange little secret meetings between me and the finance department, who, very commendably, were offering to open the books so I knew what was going on financially. Highly secret, from a certain point of view, so you’d have to meet in strange hotel bars near Leamington so rumours wouldn’t start. A bit John le Carré but it was fun. And what you had to do was go for a morning to the board, the selection committee, and do your pitch; and it went well, it went fine — even as I was doing it, I thought, “I hope I don’t get this job, it’ll kill me.” It would’ve been too much, it would’ve wrecked my life, it would’ve wrecked my home life, it would’ve wrecked everything.
RC: Going back to the book, you talk therein of “men and women whom love is as likely to break as to redeem” — this re. Coriolanus, but it’s a major theme in Shakespeare’s work. I think of Romeo — ‘Juliet, thy beauty hath made me effeminate’ — and of course the protagonists of Antony and Cleopatra, which play you describe in the book as “a great study of middle-aged folly”.
MP: Yes, before I was offered the play to do; now I’m going to have to rethink it a bit. I think it’s interesting what Shakespeare does — Coriolanus is a brilliant example of it because if someone is a sort of statue, if he’s a fixed point, if his philosophy is complete, if his life is absolutely without doubt or crack or fissure, what happens when something upsets it? What happens when you find it unbearable to see your mother kneeling before you — “Despair, Rome” — what happens? He could be redeemed, he could become human, but by then he’s in a situation where to compromise in that way means he’s going to get killed.
You’re right about Romeo. Troilus is perhaps an even better example, because from the very beginning of the relationship with Cressida he’s saying, “I’m unmanned” — all his imagery is military, and he fears that he’s going to lose his ability as a fighter because of his obsession with Cressida. When he loses her, of course, he becomes a tremendous killing machine, so he becomes more than what he wanted to be in the first place. Shakespeare’s interested in love saving a person, but he’s also interested in love destroying a person because their previous position is too extreme to adjust to it.
With Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s interested in how ego or vanity may destroy a relationship. There’s something about their awareness of how history is going to judge them which is not altogether glorious. But I also think, as far as I’ve thought about it, that there’s an obsession there — she sails away from a battle, and he has to follow her and leaves all his troops behind him; that’s how obsessed he is, an absolute addiction.
I never thought I would play Antony; I had a physical image of him as a stocky little bruiser, which I’m not really, naturally. But what I’m beginning to love about him is the fantastic reckless generosity in his nature. His greatest moment in the play is when Enobarbus deserts him, and he tells the messenger to send all his stuff after him: “Give him my love”, in effect, is what he says; say I hope he never has to go through a crisis like this again, the crisis he must have gone through to leave me. And then this other side, this obsessive passion for Cleopatra. I begin to see it’s a rather remarkably put-together character.
As I say in the book, you get offered a Shakespeare part and you stop sleeping, really, in the nicest possible way, you become a sort of cheerful insomniac, because everything in your life feeds into it.
RC: Do you have a wish list of roles yet to play?
MP: There’s only one. Guess what?
RC: Lear?
MP: Yeah. Maybe Prospero. But Lear mostly. But I must be honest about it, y’know, I’m supposed to want to play Lear. For a long time I thought, I don’t know what I would have to add to it or say about it or do with it particularly. So I felt a bit dutiful about wanting to do it. And then about three or four years ago, I was making my breakfast one morning, and I thought, “I want to do Lear. I want to have a go — I just want to be in a rehearsal room and do it. I don’t know what I think about the part — well, I do, but I don’t have a plan like a director would have but I want to see what it feels like.” So my irons are in the fire, let’s put it that way.
But it’s funny, this thing about the Shakespeare inheritance, cos there are lots of actors who don’t want to do any Shakespeare at all. And I’ve for long periods not wanted to do any. Maybe it’s like Shakespeare’s own marriage: you’re wedded to the man and half the time you don’t want to see him or have anything to do with him. But he keeps calling you back.
[Michael Pennington did play Lear, appearing in the play two years after this interview at the Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn under the direction of Arin Arbus. He played the role again in 2016 at the Royal and Derngate, Northampton under the direction of Max Webster.]
