Theatre work
He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company on graduation and remained in a junior capacity from 1964 to 1966, playing among other things Fortinbras in David Warner's 1965 Hamlet . He then left the company for eight years and worked in London, both on the stage (in John Mortimer's The Judge, Christopher Hampton's Savages and Tony Richardson's production of Hamlet with Nicol Williamson), and on TV in many single dramas. He returned to the RSC in 1974 to play Angelo in Measure for Measure , beginning a relationship with the company as a leading actor which culminated in his own performance of Hamlet in 1980/81: he also played Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost , Edgar in King Lear , and in new work by David Rudkin, David Edgar and Howard Brenton and classic works by Sean O'Casey, Euripides and William Congreve. He then left the company for a further eight years before appearing in Stephen Poliakoff's Playing with Trains, and ten years after that in the title role of Timon of Athens . In the meanwhile he appeared at the National Theatre in 1984 in Tolstoy's Strider , for which he was nominated for an Olivier Award, in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd , and also premiered his solo show Anton Chekhov which he has been regularly touring internationally ever since. He also played Raskolnikov in Yuri Lyubimov's adaptation of Crime and Punishment , and Henry in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing in London's West End and played the title role in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex on BBC TV in 1985.
In 1986, Pennington and director Michael Bogdanov together founded the English Shakespeare Company. As joint artistic director, he starred in the company's inaugural productions of The Henrys and, in 1987, the seven-play history cycle of The Wars of the Roses, which toured worldwide and was televised. Pennington played such parts as Richard II, Prince Hal/Henry V and Jack Cade (Olivier Award Nomination). In subsequent seasons with the ESC, he played Leontes in The Winter's Tale and the title roles in Macbeth and Coriolanus (Olivier Award Nomination) and directed Twelfth Night, which he then also directed for the Haiyuza Theatre Company in Tokyo and for the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre.
Since the 1970s, he has appeared frequently with Judi Dench and also with her husband Michael Williams. The third time he played opposite Dench was in Peter Shaffer's play The Gift of the Gorgon, in 1992, in which they appeared as a married couple. [3] His other West End work in the 1990s included Archie Rice in The Entertainer, Claudius and the Ghost in Hamlet, Major Arnold in Taking Sides (Ronald Harwood), Oscar Wilde in Gross Indecency, Sir John Brute in Farquhar'sThe Provok’d Wife, Henry Trebell in Harley Granville Barker's Waste, Trigorin in The Seagull, and the title role in Molière's The Misanthrope. In the first Harold Pinter Festival in Dublin he played in Pinter's Old Times and One for the Road. In 1998, he worked with Sir Peter Hall and other actors to run a workshop at the National Theatre Studio, which received considerable plaudits. [4]
His stage work in the 2000s included Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw (National tour), the title role in The Guardsman (West End), David Mamet's The Shawl (Crucible Theatre Sheffield), Walter Burns in The Front Page, (Chichester Festival Theatre), the title roles in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman and Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III, and Dr Dorn in Chekhov's The Seagull, directed by Peter Stein for the Edinburgh Festival) In 2003 he directed A Midsummer Night's Dream in Regent's Park Open Air Theatre and The Hamlet Project for the National Theatre in Bucharest. In 2005 he appeared in David Greig's The Cosmonaut's Last Message... (Donmar Warehouse); Colder Than Here (Soho Theatre), and in the title role in Nathan the Wise (Hampstead Theatre).
He also played a sequence of real-life characters such as Sidney Cockerell in The Best of Friends (Hampstead Theatre 2006), 2007 : Robert Maxwell in The Bargain by Ian Curteis (2007), Charles Dickens in Little Nell by Simon Gray (2007), Wilhelm Furtwangler in Pinter's Taking Sides and Richard Strauss in Collaboration by Ronald Harwood (Chichester and West End, 2008–9) He had previously played the other central role in Taking Sides in the West End, with Pinter directing. [5]
In 2006 he premièred his second one-man show, this one on Shakespeare, Sweet William, and in 2009 he worked with Peter Brook for the first time in Love is My Sin for a European Tour and in New York.
In 2010 he returned to Chichester to play the title role in Ibsen's The Master Builder, and the following year Dr Fabio in The Syndicate by Eduardo de Filippo opposite Ian McKellen. In 2012 he played his fifth consecutive Chichester season as Antony in Antony and Cleopatra opposite Kim Cattrall. Notable performances since then have been as Edgar in Strindberg's The Dance of Death, adapted by Howard Brenton, at the Gate Theatre, as John of Gaunt in Richard II (RSC), and as Anthony Blunt in Alan Bennett's Single Spies, at the Rose Theatre Kingston. In 2014 he performed the title role in King Lear for Theatre for a New Audience in New York, before undertaking a further tour of his solo Shakespeare show Sweet William (Oregon, Tel Aviv, France). He recorded the part of Euripides in Macedonia by David Rudkin for Radio 3, and in 2015 plans to take his solo show Anton Chekhov to Moscow. In 2015 he performed Sweet William in Argentina and Uruguay at the Festival Shakespeare Buenos Aires and Festival Shakespeare Uruguay.
Other work
In 1983, Pennington appeared as Moff Jerjerrod in the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi alongside fellow Old Vic alum James Earl Jones. He also played Michael Foot in The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep; and among his notable TV appearances have been in the title role of Oedipus Rex and in the television movie The Return of Sherlock Holmes . He has also played Holmes's nemesis, Professor Moriarty in two BBC Radio dramatizations of the Holmes short stories The Final Problem in 1992 [6] and The Empty House [7] in 1993.
He is the author of the book Are You There, Crocodile? [8] which combines biographical material about the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov with an account of the writing of his highly successful one-man show about Chekhov; the full text of which is included. He has also written three books about individual Shakespeare plays, Sweet William - Twenty Thousand Hours with Shakespeare, as well as Let Me Play the Lion Too - How to Be an Actor for Faber and Faber. His solo show Sweet William is available as a DVD. Pennington has also worked as a narrator on many TV documentaries.
In April 2004, he became the second actor, after Harley Granville-Barker in 1925, to deliver the British Academy's annual Shakespeare lecture. The lecture was entitled Barnadine's Straw: The Devil in Shakespeare's Detail. [9]
