The educational programmes at the RSC and Berry 33 

Soon after her appointment in 1970 at the RSC, Cicely Berry also became involved in the newly established education programmes of the Company. Directors like Terry Hands and Buzz Goodbody were eager to take adapted productions of Shakespeare into the broader community, particularly to schools and community centres. They also wished to break down the barriers some people may have experienced in attending a more formal, theatrical performance, by using the Other Place. The aim was to make the classics more accessible to younger people who were the potential new audiences of the future. This outreach also involved workshops and discussions after performances. The smaller, intimate setting of The Other Place theatre in Stratford also helped create a friendlier, welcoming atmosphere for attracting non-theatre goers, as well as young people.

Buzz Goodbody had great success with her production in this respect, of King Lear in 1974 (Smith-Howard 2006:35,36). It is likely that Berry could have seen this production which according to Smith-Howard emphasised the personal, familial relationships in the play and also “invited its audience to reconsider issues of power, authority, kingship, corruption and poverty in an historical and political context” (Smith-Howard 2006:38). It appealed directly to the emotions of the audience and had a “truth and honesty…[and an] interactive style of performance [which] incorporated the audience into the performance” (Smith-Howard

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2006:41). The text was brought alive in the space in a very direct and physical way which was both “challenging and entertaining” (Smith-Howard 2006:42). This kind of contemporary approach to the text and making it relevant to issues audiences could relate to, was also one of the seeds that took hold in Berry’s work in the 1970s and early 1980s.

In her book The Actor and the Text (1987,1992) Berry comments on this phase of her career. She took her educational work very seriously and is very proud of the “forceful unit” (Berry 1992:288) that the RSC educational programme became. Over the years, she herself conducted many workshops at schools for both students and teachers (mostly on Shakespeare) and worked with community groups on exploring the language. In Stratford she also started an initiative for English and drama teachers which was supported by the Ministry of Education (Berry 2001:39). It was during this time that she actively started developing her ideas on finding physical and imaginative exercises to help students release their voices and free up their responses to the text. She often worked in areas considered as “rough” or in what she refers to as “low ability schools” (Parker 1985:32) where Shakespeare was not read or popular and was amazed at the response to the words once the learners were allowed to explore the text freely and in a creative way as a group. She remembers the large number of workshops done at some Newcastle schools as being particularly energetic and exciting (Parker 1985:32). Indeed, she says that these learners often showed a more imaginative interpretation of the text because they were encouraged not to be limited by ideas of what was correct and proper in their speaking aloud (Berry 1992:289). She acknowledges the influence this workshop-approach had within such institutions, on the work she then subsequently did with the RSC-trained actors, as being very fruitful.

Unfortunately, there is not much detail about these years, specifically in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the projects she undertook. She refers to some specific events in her books (The Actor and the Text and The Text in Action) namely, two important educational projects on Othello and King Lear (Berry 2001:40) but one wishes that more could have been recorded. The workshop on Othello apparently involved a group of teenage boys who were initially difficult to work with and seemingly uninterested in what Berry had to offer. She made them do a very physical exercise, pulling at each other with linked arms while speaking the text and encouraged them to release their feelings while moving. It resulted in some chaos in the classroom, but in this way they became involved in the physical sensation and intensity of the words and seemed to connect more to what was going on in the character of Othello’s mind (Berry 2001:41).

The workshop on King Lear was with “a group of what [she] was told were ‘low-ability readers’, also in London” (Berry 2001:41). Berry was impressed with the young people’s ability, once they were more comfortable with the language, to find the essence of the

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important imagery in Act 1, scene ii, in Edmund’s speech where he describes his feelings of inferiority in being a bastard. They connected to their own experience of feeling ‘black’, ‘poor’ and ‘ugly’ (Berry 2001:41) even though they did not fully comprehend all the meanings and subtlety of the language. This is a very interesting, early observation made by Berry—that you don’t need to understand every word fully (at first, anyway) in Shakespeare and other heightened, dramatic texts in order to make a kind of performance sense of it. I feel that this insight freed her up to develop many exercises that are physically based, allowing the actor freedom and confidence in expressing words: “through the physical exercises they were able objectively to find the sound and force of those words, and gain confidence in speaking them” (Berry 2001:42).

King Lear is the play she considers to be the most important ever written and Berry has travelled with it, so to speak, throughout her life (Berry 2008:173). Already in these early days of teaching workshops to children, teachers and professional actors she was creating exercises that helped the individual and the group understand the dramatic meaning inherent in the words and the creative potential in expressing the images contained in the language. Berry encouraged individual responses to the work; a sense of danger and being incorrect and says “we have to continually find ways for the actor to get behind the literal meaning and connect with the words at their very root” (Berry 2001:42).This she has endeavoured to do throughout her work and the foundations of her approach were established and flourished, I feel, as a result of her fortunate position in being part of a highly professional, theatrical company but also having regular contact with untrained or semi-trained people from all walks of life, in the workshop situation.