Berry does not underestimate the importance of a performer’s technical preparation and abilities being honed and vocally fine-tuned. She started off at the Central School teaching exactly all these technical exercises and working comprehensively through the various aspects of voice production. Her first book Voice and the Actor (1973) deals extensively with
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the background to the actor’s voice and how one thinks about your own voice and what could prevent effective vocal performance. It is her seminal book I and worth a short overview, as many of her later ideas had their origin here and reflect the essence of her views on sound and language.
In the foreword to Voice and the Actor Peter Brook already recognises Berry’s fundamental idea, that to enable the actor to release his vocal blockages and to respond creatively with “life in the voice” he needs to be exposed to “good verse” and inspiring material that “strikes echoes in the speaker that awakens portions of his deep experience which are seldom evoked in everyday speech” (Berry 1973:3). This recognition of the importance of allowing work on language to inform technical exercises for the actor, is clear from the beginning in her approach and training.
Voice and the Actor is mostly concerned with the practical aspects of voice training for the theatre actor or performer and contains detailed discussion and technical exercises in each section regarding relaxation and breathing combined, muscularity and word, and using the whole voice, as well as a short chapter on listening (Berry 1973:18,43,123,130). These chapters address the need for the actor to understand the value of doing physical exercises on the release of tension in the body, working on breathing, releasing fully on vocalising and to experience the movements of various muscles (both small and large), in the active process of articulating sounds and words. These chapters are quite straightforward and more traditional in approach compared to her later works.
However, already the selected texts for exploration are challenging in themselves, whether the focus is on finding breath support, stronger tone or clarity in articulation. Characteristically, the first two texts are a Shakespearean song Fear no more the heat o’ the Sun (Berry 1973:30) and the Chorus Speech from the Prologue, Act IV in Henry V (Berry 1973:33,34). The aim is to connect breath and sound on this particular phrasing and to feel a purpose in this connection through the words. She also suggests a simple exercise of swinging the arms on phrases and releasing the spine forward and to the sides on some of the lines. Taking time to stand upright then and on feeling the breath and freeing the sound physically through movement, leads to more “freedom and resonance, and a feeling of the whole mechanism coming together” (Berry 1973:31).
In Chapter 3, Muscularity and Word, Berry (1992:43–75) again suggests working on a modern text by Edith Sitwell and older poems by John Dryden and Robert Herrick. These texts encourage the actor to find an “extra awareness on material which demands agility and clarity” (Berry 1973:73–75). In these early chapters she wants to assist the actor in finding a sense of rhythm and timing in the beat of the verse and to feel a precision in the diction at the same time. She encourages the performer to move on the words (almost to dance on them,
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in a way) and to allow this sense of looseness and energy to be transferred into the speaking. Through this the performer can then be open to more possibilities in the rhythm, length of sounds, tempo and inflections which can enhance the meaning of the poem or text. An awareness of the physicality of sound can free the actor to try different interpretations with more confidence. A revealing comment by Berry (1973:72) which perhaps encapsulates the essence of her idea is “In this poem[s] you learn a lot about words doing their own work”. At this stage, Berry does not over-intellectualize the potential meanings in a literary discussion of the texts. She rather wants the actor to be aware of what the process and experience of the speaking is and how the sounds of these words can offer her an understanding, on a more visceral, physical level—one which goes beyond what words mean in a purely grammatical sense. This way of working on text has continued throughout her career and although adapted and refined, it remains one of the essential aspects of her approach.
Chapter 4, The Whole Voice (Berry 1973:76–100) and Chapter 5, Speaking Poetry (Berry 1973:101–122), contain the bulk of texts in Voice and the actor and these range from Ode to the West Wind by Percy Shelley, an extract from Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas, a sizable extract from Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion, The Rape of Lucrece by Shakespeare and Over Sir John’s Hill also by Dylan Thomas. These are substantial, difficult poems and in our contemporary times, I suspect a considerable technical challenge to speak clearly and coherently and with full understanding, even by first language English speakers.
Chapter 5 focuses specifically of the speaking of poetry and its value for the actor/speaker. As Berry (1973:77) states earlier “the voice will never be as good in exercise as it will be when you have done the exercises, forgotten them and are using the voice imaginatively”. She affirms the need for the actor to be exposed to “material that can be used over and over again because it is possible to get different things out of it each time” (Berry 1973:77). She does emphasize that the groundwork such as warming the voice fully and preparing the muscles to be receptive to thought and expression, is necessary first and from that point of preparedness, this transfer or “progression to passages” (Berry 1973:77) will then be most effective. Working on poetry and dramatic material without sufficient preparation may be self- defeating. Once the performer is at ease in the body and voice then she will be open to what the heightened text has to offer: “the emphasis gradually shifts from technical ability into the interpretation of the sense” (Berry 1973:77). The discovery of meaning she feels is something that comes more “from sound—meanings which cannot necessarily be explained and which go deeper than our conscious, logical mind” (Berry 1973:101).
In terms of speaking heightened language, she says it should not be a fearful barrier to be crossed; simply a balance needs to be found between sounding overly formal or too casually
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conversational (Berry 1973:101). She wants to actively encourage the performer to take note of the form of the text, the metre in the lines, the “sophisticated and subtle way…imagery, associations of words, internal rhythms and all the devices a poet uses [so that] then the whole thing becomes wide open with possibilities” (Berry 1973:102). The language in a text is closely looked at from various angles but meaning is not pre-judged or concluded until a process of listening has been embarked on, “for it is through listening for what the text contains that you will hear its possibilities” (Berry 1973:102).
Berry stays with the older verse in this chapter, works like Corinna’s Going a Maying by Robert Herrick, paying attention to the metrical structure, rhythm, the length of the vowels and consonants, the pauses and stresses in each line and the interrelation of lines with each other. Some brief commentary is given to meaning but less time is spent on this overall. The focus is on the actual speaking of the words and what could (not should) be understood about the sense of the poem. She does though provide clues to interpretation; some general comments of what the text could be about but seems to point more to alerting us to what it could mean when the sound changes. As she puts it “an awareness of how sound can take you into another territory, not logically, for it does not need to explain anything” (Berry 1973:105) and “language itself reacts on us” (Berry 1973:105).
Berry wants our ears to be wide open and alert to the energy in words; recognising that they have a physical quality in themselves and how this informs the way they are written and also therefore having a deep effect on how we hear them. Berry (1973:110) uses a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins called No Worst, there is None and A Nocturnal upon St. Lucie’s Day by John Donne as examples to discuss the intensity of language and how the strength of feeling is conveyed by the “physical presence of the images” (Berry 1973:111). These two poets’ use of language, for her, contains a wide variety of nuance and rhythm, in both argument and emotion and require a larger energy and focus from the speaker (Berry 1973:111). Interestingly, this chapter also includes modern poems by Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats and D.H. Lawrence, all combining the formal with the colloquial sound which she finds such valuable vocal training for the actor. Her aim as always, is to connect “stylized language (sophisticated language of any sort including slang and ‘in’ phrases) with its physical root” (Berry 1973:121). She states: “If you are talking trivialities it is not the triviality that is important—it is the need to speak it that matters” (Berry 1973:121). She is also adamant that one should not prescribe to actors exactly how a line or speech should be spoken or sound. This is a matter of personal perception and is necessary to maintain as this sense of individuality in the spoken expression is “what makes poetry alive” (Berry 1973:122).
In the final two chapters (6 and 7) of the book, namely Listening and Using the Voice, she also recommends the speaker investigates and practically explores Part 3 of the poem East
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Coker from the Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot and an extract of Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw. The emphasis is on discovery and taking time with feeling the rhythms, images and listening:
If you become emphatic or present a conclusion with either of them you will cut out their reverberations. If you receive the words and allow them to ‘touch down’ they will take on a meaning which is particular to you. (Berry 1973:125)
Already, Berry is moving to more modern writing and again, these texts are not only included because of their literary value but because they are linked clearly to what the actor/performer could learn from speaking them aloud, in different spaces of varying sizes. At the end of Voice and the Actor technical work is linked with the imaginative approach and the communication of the actor, which is always the primary objective. Berry refers back to the experience of working with Peter Brook on A Midsummer Night’s Dream a few years before writing her book, and makes an astute observation on the difficulties actors often face while working on dramatic or poetic language. She seems to have encountered this problem or issue in many similar scenarios in different countries and in different contexts:
The problem which the actors had in small groups, that of being absolutely specific with the voice and with the words, was invariably the same problem they had in acting. (Berry 1973:134)
This connection between voice work and the application of textual exploration to solve possible problems encountered in acting and performance, is very pertinent to Berry’s later views, where training the voice becomes an extension of training the actor as a whole. These ideas are already present in Voice and the Actor and are further expanded in her later books to include the director in this process of discovery, in how an awareness of language and sound, used in different strategies/aspects in rehearsal can contribute directly to finding layers of meaning in a play. In the next chapter I shall discuss some of her exercises and strategies that could be useful in defining essential images, actions and interactions between actors that might lead the cast of the Fugard play, Sorrows and Rejoicings and myself, to deeper insights for performance.