An Evening with Michael Pennington

About

PUSHKIN CLUB PROGRAMME Language: In English Michael Pennington will give a talk and readings from The Island of Sakhalin, Chekhov's extraordinary work on Sakhalin, looking into the penal colony conditions there in 1890, a work highly valuable both as a detailed depiction of the Tsarist system of penal servitude and as an insight into Chekhov's own motivations and objectives. Michael will also read from Chekhov's correspondence as he undertook the arduous eleven-week journey across Siberia to the island. Michael Pennington has been a leading British actor for thirty years playing a wide variety of roles in London's West End, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre and the English Shakespeare Company, which he co-founded. He has played Raskolnikov in Lyubimov's version of Crime and Punishment, directed by Yuri Lyubimov at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Most recently at the Chichester Festival Theatre he has played Solness in Ibsen's The Master Builder. His acclaimed one man play, Anton Chekhov was first performed at the National Theatre, In his book Are You There, Crocodile? Michael Pennington retraces his ten-year search via Moscow, Siberia and London for identification with the elusive Chekhov — a journey that offers vivid insight into the Russia in which the playwright and his contemporaries lived. It includes the text of his play Anton Chekhov, as performed in recent revivals at the Old Vic and Chichester Festival Theatre. He is chairman of the UK Anton Chekhov Foundation, a charity which recently succeeded in organizing a campaign to restore the Chekhov House Museum in Yalta, which was run down in post- Soviet times.