Michael Pennington has played Hamlet, Timon of Athens, Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Edgar in King Lear, Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Hector in Troilus and Cressida, Ferdinand in The Tempest, John of Gaunt in Richard II, Angelo in Measure for Measure (1974) and the Duke in the same play (1978) for the Royal Shakespeare Company. For the English Shakespeare Company, of which he was co-founder and joint Artistic Director, he appeared as Richard II, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, Prince Hal and Henry V in Henry IV and Henry V, Buckingham in Richard III and Jack Cade and Suffolk in Henry VI. He played Claudius and the Ghost in Hamlet for the Peter Hall Company, Posthumus in Cymbeline for BBC Television, and, in 2014, the title role in King Lear for Theatre for a New Audience in New York. He has directed Twelfth Night for the English Shakespeare Company, for the Haiyuza Company of Tokyo and for Chicago Shakespeare Theater; A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park; and The Hamlet Project for the National Theatre Bucharest. In 2004 he gave the annual British Academy Shakespeare Lecture (Barnardine’s Straw: The Devil in Shakespeare’s Detail), the first practitioner to do so since Harley Granville Barker in 1925.
He has also appeared in leading roles in the work of Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Eduardo de Filippo, Howard Brenton, Euripides, Sophocles, Molière, William Congreve, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Stephen Poliakoff, David Edgar, Ronald Harwood, Simon Gray, Sean O’Casey, Christopher Hampton, John Mortimer, David Greig, Thomas Otway, Leo Tolstoy, Ferenc Molnar, Oscar Wilde, David Rudkin, Hugh Whitemore, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Tom Stoppard, Mikhail Bulgakov, Peter Shaffer, Harley Granville Barker, Laura Wade, Hanif Kureishi, John Vanbrugh, Joe Orton, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, David Mamet, Alan Bennett and August Strindberg.
He is an Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the author of three books on individual Shakespeare plays (Hamlet, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and one on Chekhov (Are You There, Crocodile?). He continues to tour his solo shows, Sweet William and Anton Chekhov, throughout the world.