Theater review: This 'William' is indeed sweet, illuminating

William Shakespeare "crept up and hit me like a hammer when I was 11 years old," says British actor Michael Pennington at the beginning of his two-hour discourse on the bard's life and work. The felicitous discovery seems still fresh in Pennington's soul lo these decades later, as he demonstrates in "Sweet William," which opened Tuesday at the Guthrie Proscenium for a two-week run.

Pennington's love letter to Shakespeare draws on some 20,000 hours performing his work and many thousands more spent researching, analyzing, reading, pondering the work so that it has become "as present as white noise" in his life.

His manifest is not biography in the exhaustive sense. Rather, he offers a slice of his observations, illustrated with small scenes from the canon. Pennington connects the dots of Shakespeare's life with a supple surety that relies less on historical record than it does on the revelations in his texts.

Pennington suggests that Shakespeare's mind churned constantly as a young actor faced with poor dialogue. "He took the bad lines he'd read as an actor and refined them in his head for other actors."

Too, the British actor/director divines Shakespeare's political convictions from the insistent and sharp critique of privilege in "King Lear," and the subversive suggestion that not even the love of "Romeo and Juliet" can deter their warring families from violence. Pennington sees in "Hamlet" a playwright wondering whether we want someone in power who is a bad person but a good king, or a good person who might stumble as a leader.

Heroes are brought low in Shakespeare, tripped up by fools and commoners.

Pennington plumbs deeper for evidence than the well-known (clichéd?) soliloquies. For example, he cites lines from "Timon of Athens" to comment on the court of King James. He pauses on the dialogue of "The Winter's Tale" to muse over Shakespeare's thoughts about children.

All along, Pennington celebrates the ethereal highs of Shakespeare's literature and its earthy lows -- a range of humanity that rings through the centuries. And he does so with a voice and cadence that cradles each phrase with delicious inflection and meaning. The result is as lively and engaging a primer as one might hope for.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299