OnStage: All about Shakespeare? Sweet

Michael Pennington has spent more than a little time with William Shakespeare. The British actor figures that he has logged more than 20,000 hours onstage, performing or directing the bard's work. So why not share that bone-deep knowledge and experience with others?

Pennington has done just that, fashioning "Sweet William," a one-man show that uses Shakespeare's work to illuminate the playwright's life. In the style of Charles Keating's recent "I and I" at the Guthrie studio, this piece mixes performance and analysis. It opens Tuesday for a limited run on the proscenium stage.

Pennington is perhaps in flight at this moment over the Atlantic, having just closed the show in London in anticipation of the Guthrie engagement. Michael Billington, the Guardian's theater critic, said the piece combines Pennington's performance skills "with textual scholarship and practical knowledge to give us as well-rounded a portrait of Shakespeare and his art as you could hope for in two hours."

When Joe Dowling and Pennington got together in London last summer, the Guthrie director asked his old friend to bring the show to Minneapolis.

"I'd read the reviews and they were fantastic," Dowling said. "And we thought perhaps he could come sometime next year, but then he suddenly called and asked, 'Do you have a theater open in December?' and we did."

'So steeped in Shakespeare'

Pennington has played leading roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and his own English Shakespeare Company, which he founded in 1986 with Michael Bogdanov. He has also published three user's guides to individual Shakespeare plays.

In "Sweet William," he weaves biography through some of the bard's famous speeches, as they arise from the narrative. By e-mail, he said that he chose the pieces not so much to illustrate Shakespeare's style or imagery as to provide examples of "his humanity" and to demonstrate his political or social views, "as far as I can guess at them."

Despite his long association with Shakespeare's work and the obvious research that he's done, Pennington said he feels that he still doesn't know much about the man.

"We're thrown back on the plays, undistracted, as we always were," he wrote.

Still, he said, if there was a surprise in his discoveries, it dealt with Shakespeare's changing style under different monarchs.

"He wrote differently under James I than Elizabeth I," Pennington wrote. "Under Elizabeth, he was left alone more and not particularly encouraged by the crown. But under James, he was actively encouraged by a king whose court he probably disliked and criticized."

Billington was less reticent toward Pennington's understanding of Shakespeare. His review pointed out that Pennington offers new insight into critical periods of the bard's life.

Pennington "suggests that, in the famous 'missing years' between his departure from Stratford and arrival in London, Shakespeare was a touring actor and the kind of 'company member who was always complaining about the script,'" Billington wrote.

Dowling agrees that Pennington's knowledge goes deeper than the average bear.

"He's so steeped in Shakespeare," said Dowling. "That's the thing that's been the work of his lifetime."

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299