Michael Pennington: Hong Kong, Helicopters, and Henry IV
Plus: puppies
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Michael Pennington
Michael Pennington died this month. I saw him onstage once as Lear at TFANA and spent many hours watching him on screen as Oedipus2 and Hector.3 Most obituaries highlight his appearance in Return of the Jedi and the fact he turned down the Jeremy Irons role in The French Lieutenant’s Woman to play Hamlet at the RSC (more). A few feature his Sherlock and oddly hot Timon.
His guides to Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Midsummer are among the best Shakespeare books I’ve ever read.4 If you are doing those plays, read those books. His account (co-written with Michael Bogdanov) of the English Shakespeare Company’s War of the Roses world tour5 should also be on your list. It is full of insights and insane tour stories:6 a stage manager dropping unused ammunition into Hong Kong harbor, a carpenter dropping 20 feet into an elevator shaft in Chichester, two actors + an assistant director rescued by helicopter after two days lost in an Australian bog, the company behaving like “demented millionaires” in East Germany once they realized their per diems (paid in marks) would be worthless outside the country, plus the craziest rehearsal stories this side of Henry IV Part I.7
Quick Links
The RSC is going on tour. All the cool kids are doing it. (Rob Myles has thoughts.)
Shakespeare can get your film made.
“‘Hamnet’ is a story about grief and something terrible happening to a person but it has the hook: it’s Shakespeare.”
The reason I chose Ophelia for this fragrance is because in Hamlet she's very innocent and young. She doesn't really have much agency and, of course, she had a tragic death.
Muttering sonnets in the quiet car because Claude told you to. (Please don’t.10)
Oberon, Cassio, Horatio and Caesar paid a visit to Stratford as part of their environmental training…
More Shakespeare, less golf.11
Davis asked: what would the golfers think if their course were closed to make way for productions of “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet?” “I said: ‘They will be very pissed off…’”
Recommendations
Pushball and variations.
Suit the [parable] to the [parchment].
“Most intriguingly, researchers found a single goatskin page immediately after the biblical parable mentioning a young goat, raising the possibility that medieval scribes may have intentionally matched animal skin to textual content.”
“…are you guys talking about the L.A. underground alt-clown scene?” via Molly.
© 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.
Like this one.
In a phenomenal production directed by Don Taylor with a stacked cast: John Gielgud as Tiresias, Claire Bloom as Jocasta, Cyril Cusack as the Priest, and my favorite-named actor of all time, John Shrapnel, as Creon.** The dying fall on “I am Oedipus the King. Everyone knows my name” is magical and I love that stage-covering cloak.
**Followed closely by Paris Arrowsmith.
All credit to my mother who, in the pre-Youtube days, ripped DVDs of the BBC Theban plays and Playing Shakespeare from the school library.
New Twelfth Nights are on Bookshop.org. Midsummer, Hamlet, and Roses can be trickier, but there are used copies on Thriftbooks/BetterWorldBooks if you prefer to avoid Abe/Amazon.
“They wanted to call the book The Cost of the Erection (a Shakespeare quote, of course). I rather primly demurred, and after some spirited discussion it was published as The English Shakespeare Company: The Story of the Wars of the Roses, 1986-89 (1990).”
“One company member set fire to Pennington’s dressing room, ran away during rehearsals, and ended up shaving off his eyebrows and throwing himself off Blackfriars Bridge.”
“…John believed that Michael was sneering at him. Michael pointed out that, as the character Hal, he was looking at his father disbelievingly. John said that if a son of his had looked at him like that, he would slap him hard, but that anyway he didn’t believe Michael: it was Pennington, the actor, who was being arrogant towards him, John Castle, not to King Henry. If Michael looked at him like that again, he would hit him again. Michael said he didn’t mind being hurt if he knew it was coming but that the least John could do was (a) warn him (b) rehearse it and (c) pull the blow a bit. John said no, he would hit him when he felt like it and as hard as he liked…”
It has “serene aquatic notes” which…for a drowned girl…is a bit on the nose. It also claims to be the “ultimate peony fragrance.” Ophelia mentions a whole bunch o’flowers, but peony t’isn’t one of them. (Ah. Ophelia is the hook.)
If you must use Claude to do Shakespeare things, make cool maps instead of bothering people trying to nap on the Amtrak regional.