Michael Pennington's Sweet William - Oxford Playhouse, 27 January

If it takes ten thousand hours of practice to make a virtuoso then I’m not sure what that makes Michael Pennington - as stated in the subtitle to his show (and accompanying book) Sweet William he has spent ‘Twenty Thousand Hours with Shakespeare’.  If nothing else, it makes him an excellent companion on a whistle stop tour of Shakespeare’s life and works.

A show such as this could have been very dry - an hour and a half lecture repeating for the thousandth time that we know surprisingly little about the facts of Shakespeare’s actual life, punctuated with the occasional ‘to be or not to be’ and rounded with a sleep.  Instead, Pennington gives us his own personal experience of Shakespeare.  How he first encountered him on a family outing to see Macbeth when he was a young boy, then linking into Shakespeare’s portrayal of children.  How he believes that Shakespeare joined a travelling theatre company in those lost years between Stratford and London, then linking into his own experience of being in a touring Shakespeare company and the difficulty of transporting stage weapons in Hong Kong (a universal problem, surely).

Pennington’s passion is clear throughout the show, especially when he discusses Shakespeare’s language.  As we the audience love to have Shakespeare’s words in our ears, Pennington the actor clearly loves to feel the words on his tongue, deftly launching into a number of lesser-known speeches from a variety of the plays and sonnets, becoming a young boy, an old man, a spurned lover, all the while managing not to come across as an arrogant luvvie showing off his range.

Near the end of his talk Pennington describes Shakespeare as a master ventriloquist who created a multitude of voices.  Continuing with that metaphor, and not sounding like it but intended entirely as a compliment, Pennington is a master dummy.

Original review here

Mark Haddon: Swimming and Flying - Oxford Playhouse, 23 September

Mark Haddon was at the Oxford Playhouse on Friday performing a talk/essay especially written for the occasion, in support of the Playhouse‘s fundraising appeal. Haddon was alone on a stage set up for another play to be shown later that evening, there to deliver what was ostensibly an autobiographical talk, but what turned out to be a very intricately written, extremely engaging, and ultimately quite moving, work of poetry.

He ranged from school days, playing darts badly in the common room, to the moon landing, to strange fan mail after the success of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, via recitations of Henry David Thoreau and Louis MacNeice, with a bit of his own poetry seamlessly woven in.

As well as being an author, Mark Haddon also teaches students how to write, and he explained how he tells them that specific details are what brings writing to life, but that the gaps that the writer creates for the reader to fill are just as important. He subtly illustrated his own point by flowing undetectably from his own poem, Great White, about a terror of sharks, to a story about how he loves to swim in the Thames. This story wove in and out of another story about how he tried to combat his fear of flying by learning to fly himself. He would keep returning to these stories, and to a particular image of a single drop of rain on a floating feather, teasing poignancy out of the seemingly mundane.

Haddon managed to create a sense of wonder in tiny details, and clearly never wanted to lose his own sense of wonder at the universe. In writing, and in his approach to life, he said that it is not so much the answers that matter, but understanding the enormity of the questions. If said questions are being asked by Mark Haddon then I certainly want to listen.


Original review here