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London,
Fiona Mountford's rating
Reader rating
Description: Michael Pennington's one-man show in which he parallels his own life with that of Shakespeare, performs well-known monologues and reflects on his acting career with the Royal Shakespeare Company and his own English Shakespeare Company.
Trains: BR: Dalston Kingsland 
Phone: 0207503 1646
Website: www.arcolatheatre.com
Extra info: Food, Pub
Avuncular: Michael Pennington takes us elegantly through Shakespeare's life and work
If you plan to see one biography-of-Shakespeare show in your life, it might as well be Sweet William. After all, its writer-performer is the affable, erudite and mellifluous RSC stalwart Michael Pennington who, smitten by the iambic pentameter after a trip to see Macbeth at the age of 11, has clocked up more than 20,000 stage hours performing Shakespeare. For a look at the man, as well as sensitively performed excerpts from his work, Pennington is the one.
And yet I would contest that this peculiar sub-genre, an uneasy halfway house between lecture hall and theatre, is one best avoided by actors and audience alike. I still shudder at the memory of Susannah York skipping around, middle-aged and white-clad, recounting her youthful triumphs as Juliet. The trouble is that, however finely wrought the surrounding text, the passages of Shakespeare cannot but feel disembodied. We haven't built up to any of the emotion contained therein, giving an impostor-like sensation. For the performer, it's acting at its most artificial, which sits uneasily in today's hyper-realistic clime.
Mercifully, Pennington doesn't wear white or skip but stands still or sits like an avuncular Jackanory storyteller in a wooden chair, the only prop on the large, bare stage. Without turning the piece into a tedious study-guide chronology, he takes us elegantly through Shake-speare's life and work, from early Warwickshire days to the arrival of this "upstart crow" in London, through to the patronage of James I, whose licentious court Shakespeare so subtly parodied in Timon of Athens.
Pennington sensibly avoids Now That's What I Call Shakespeare numbers from Hamlet and Henry V, concentrating instead on lesser-known speeches from the likes of Henry VI Part Three. His gently wry mockery of the Shakespearean tourist tat of modern-day Stratford leaves us wanting slightly more contemporary commentary, as well as a greater account of Pennington's own relationship with the playwright.
It worked beautifully for Dominic Dromgoole in his recent book Will and Me, so it would be a guaranteed success for someone with Pennington's knowledge and experience. Bitter-sweet William, all in all.
• Until 8 Dec (020 7503 1646, www.arcolatheatre.com).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
