the company's inaugural productions of The Henrys and, in 1987, the seven-play history cycle of The Wars of the Roses, which toured worldwide and was televised. Pennington played such parts as Richard II, Prince Hal/Henry V and Jack Cade (Olivier Award Nomination). In subsequent seasons with the ESC, he played Leontes in The Winter's Tale and the title roles in Macbeth and Coriolanus (Olivier Award Nomination) and directed Twelfth Night, which he then also directed for the Haiyuza Theatre Company in Tokyo and for the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. Since the 1970s, he has appeared frequently with Judi Dench and also with her husband Michael Williams. The third time he played opposite Dench was in Peter Shaffer's play The Gift of the Gorgon, in 1992, in which they appeared as a married couple. His other West End work in the 1990s included Archie Rice in The Entertainer, Claudius and the Ghost in Hamlet, Major Arnold in Taking Sides (Ronald Harwood), Oscar Wilde in Gross Indecency, Sir John Brute in Farquhar'sThe Provok’d Wife, Henry Trebell in Harley Granville Barker's Waste, Trigorin in The Seagull, and the title role in Molière's The Misanthrope. In the first Harold Pinter Festival in Dublin he played in Pinter's Old Times and One for the Road. In 1998, he worked with Sir Peter Hall and other actors to run a workshop at the National Theatre Studio, which received considerable plaudits. His stage work in the 2000s included Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw (National tour), the title role in The Guardsman (West End), David Mamet's The Shawl (Crucible Theatre Sheffield), Walter Burns in The Front Page, (Chichester Festival Theatre), the title roles in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman and Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III, and Dr Dorn in Chekhov's The Seagull, directed by Peter Stein for the Edinburgh Festival) In 2003 he directed A Midsummer Night's Dream in Regent's Park Open Air Theatre and The Hamlet Project for the National Theatre in Bucharest. In 2005 he appeared in David Greig's The Cosmonaut's Last Message... (Donmar Warehouse); Colder Than Here (Soho Theatre), and in the title role in Nathan the Wise (Hampstead Theatre). He also played a sequence of real-life characters such as Sidney Cockerell in The Best of Friends (Hampstead Theatre 2006), 2007 : Robert Maxwell in The Bargain by Ian Curteis (2007), Charles Dickens in Little Nell by Simon Gray (2007), Wilhelm Furtwangler in Pinter's