Michael Pennington has been a leading actor for fifty years. For the RSC and for the English Shakespeare Company, which he co-founded, he has played Hamlet, Timon of Athens, Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Edgar in King Lear, Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Angelo in Measure for Measure, Richard II, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Henry V and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. He recently played King Lear in New York and on tour of the UK. He has also played leading roles in Chekhov, Ibsen, de Filippo, Euripides, Molière, Congreve, Osborne, Pinter, Harwood, O’Casey, Tolstoy, Wilde, Dostoyevsky, Stoppard, Bulgakov, Shaffer, Granville-Barker, Brenton, Orton, Hecht and MacArthur, Mamet, Strindberg and many others. He was Oedipus on BBC TV, Jude the Obscure on radio and Michael Foot in The Iron Lady. He continues to tour his solo shows on Shakespeare and Chekhov throughout the world.
He directed Twelfth Night in the UK, Tokyo and Chicago and The Hamlet Project for the National Theatre Bucharest. In 2004 he gave the British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, the first practitioner to do so since 1925.
His other books are Rossya: A Journey Through Siberia; The English Shakespeare Company: The Story of The Wars of the Roses (with Michael Bogdanov); Hamlet: A User’s Guide; Twelfth Night: A User’s Guide; A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A User’s Guide; Chekhov’s Three Sisters: Page to Stage; A Pocket Guide to Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg (with Stephen Unwin); Are You There, Crocodile?: Inventing Anton Chekhov; Sweet William: A User’s Guide to Shakespeare; Let Me Play the Lion Too: How to be an Actor; and King Lear in Brooklyn.
