SWEET WILLIAM. To 8 December.

London.

SWEET WILLIAM
by Michael Pennington.

Trasfalgar Studios (Studio 2) To 16 February 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.45pm MatThu & Sat 3pm.
Runs 2hr 5min One interval.

TICKETS: 0870 060 6632 (booking fee).
www.theambassadors.com/trafalgarstudios
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 November at Arcola Theatre.

Wise Michael on Sweet William is riveting stuff.
In this mix of lecture, one-way conversation and recital, Michael Pennington distils thoughts from decades playing and studying Shakespeare. Often, he accepts, his ideas are only theories, for the writer quoted more often than any other cannot be pinned down to a single opinion.

Yet Shakespeare recreated Elizabethan London repeatedly in his plays. And he stood alone in his variety of expression; rhetorical language suddenly slips into low-key, everyday chatter. So, it’s no wonder Pennington ends with one of the most marvellous of all scenes, the Gloucestershire orchard where two old justices recall their youth and, without any overt ‘statement’, juggle life and death in their quiet conversation.

As Shakespeare’s male protagonists become more unbalanced, the women find ways of asserting themselves; neither Viola nor Measure for Measure’s Isabella actually accepts the marriage proposals they receive. His greatest lovers, Antony and Cleopatra, speak glorious verse about love to anyone except each other.

Pennington’s strong on Shakespeare’s use of language to argue; unsurprisingly, for his own acting’s rooted in analysing the ideas in a speech. He explains how the playwright developed the art of the soliloquy. And he’s strong on Shakespeare’s political strengths; the Romans’ demands for bread in Coriolanus were first heard by audiences who’d just experienced bread riots, while King Lear’s speeches about wealth and poverty were daringly provocation at the court of James I, whose livery Shakespeare wore.

Yet this political animal also knew the world of flowers; the Dream’s “love-in-idleness” was a name from his Warwickshire birthplace. And there’s a sweetness to Pennington’s view of Shakespeare the grandfather writing plays about rebirth.

He misquotes playwright Robert Greene, who satirised Shakespeare as a “tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide” (“woman’s hide” was the original Henry VI, Part 3 line). And I’m not convinced by his view of sudden seriousness in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. But he’s revealing on A Winter’s Tale’s Mamillius.

Blessed with a voice that, almost simultaneously, sounds deep resonance and quiet consolation, Pennington infuses his love of Shakespeare through two hours that will delight and inspire anyone who themself’s the least bit sweet on William.

Performed by: Michael Pennington.

Lighting: David Salter.

2007-12-01 02:26:41