Speech structures—awareness of punctuation in lines (Berry 2001:161–164) 91 

This exercise aims to explore how a speech works overall and how it can be broken down into different parts or thoughts, that when combined, can define a character’s breathing rhythm and give “colour and depth” to the speech as a whole (Berry 2001:161). Here Berry pays close attention to punctuation and how this can clarify the structure of a character’s thinking and breathing in phrases and cumulative dialogue or longer monologue phrases.

Application: It worked well as a group exercise to take a piece of text from the Sorrows and

Rejoicings script and to share out various lines between actors. This we tried in the very early rehearsals on the Ovid poem Tristia. Each person in the circle spoke a full thought; as Berry (2001:163, 164) suggests from comma to semi-colon, to full stop and the idea was to complete each thought fully before the next person continued and extended the thought. This slowed down the actors’ responses initially and led to greater clarity in thinking the words through, as well as in speaking.

The group then moved through the space while speaking parts of the text together; finishing a thought and then finding another spot in the room and then speaking the following (ensuing) thoughts. This particular aspect of the exercise also worked well on individual monologues and helped the characters find variation in tone and energy by moving briskly on the phrasing and finding a sense of movement in the thoughts themselves. Both the characters Marta and Allison from Sorrows and Rejoicings benefitted from this energetic kind of work on their longer monologues. Changing physical direction on each punctuation mark enlivened the text and even led to changes in blocking, both in the early phases of rehearsal and in the performance space towards the end of rehearsal period. It also freed up the actors’ vocal responses by suggesting changes in tone and tempo as their bodies became looser and more relaxed in the space during these scenes. As Berry (2001:173) says,

A speech is itself an action, for it takes on board the issue or issues which are to be considered. It then questions them, argues them through in order to resolve them in some way, and then passes that…onto the next speaker.

92

The stinkwood table is a prominent piece of furniture in the Karoo house of the play and there is much time spent sitting, standing and moving around the table. The phrasing in certain parts of the text led to the characters exploring the attraction of this table and what it represents―even if they don’t all talk about it directly; physically being drawn closer and yet repelled away from it. Moving among chairs from thought to thought, towards each other and away, often physically reflected the relationships between characters and either the connection or lack thereof between them. Marta talks about the mundane and the extraordinary significance of the table for her “Your first visit to the village. I served you all tea in here” (Fugard 2002:10) and “But that’s the way it is for a servant…. scraps and leftovers from the table” (Fugard 2002:11). Marta continues:

So I was polishing away and we were having this good fight….and the next thing I know is she is calling me …. An Old Stinkwood Servant…. I hit her―first time ever―I hit her hard…. Look at it Rebecca, isn’t it beautiful! Ja that’s stinkwood for you. If you polish and look after it and love it, it gets more and more beautiful as it gets old …This table is alive―I can feel it when I touch it. (Fugard 2002:12,13)

Later in the text Marta’s memory intensifies “I worshipped him. He used to help me with my homework. Made me bring my schoolbooks and sit at this table and do my sums and write my composition” (Fugard 2002:38). Rebecca again, has a negative view of the table, and a different dynamic in the moving and speaking on the phrases:

I wanted to tell him that his beautiful stinkwood table wasn’t shining from the Cobra wax polish, but from the tears you rubbed into it………And I wanted to tell him that I was praying for the day when he would be gone so that the house could be sold and then some other white family’s “Stinkwood Marta” could come and start polishing the table. (Fugard 2002:40,41)

Dawid also mentions the table in scene (6): “You try writing a poem in the Karoo without a fly swatter on the table. Impossible. Whack! Whack! Whack!” (Fugard 2002:32) and moves around the table, jumping on a chair as he swats imagined flies. Yet Marta ends on a conciliatory note in the last scene where she asserts her place in the house she practically grew up in and took care of, for most of her adult life. This softer focus on the table influences her gestures and timing in the phrasing of her speaking:

From the day I was born I had my place in this room. Stinkwood Marta belonged in here as much as that table and chairs and everything else...Ja, beautiful hey!...You’ll learn to love it as well, and don’t worry, it will be

93

different for you. It won’t need your tears to make it shine. (Fugard 2002:51)

The table becomes a concrete site of acceptance and forgiveness and she tries to make Rebecca recognise her place at or ownership of it. Interestingly, all these physical as well as vocal directions are suggested by the language. Berry’s suggestions merely point the way to recognising this through awareness of structure in the dramatic sentences and how the characters react to their inner and outer landscapes.

These same ideas can be used for discovering the rhythms in the writing for a character or scene. Berry is interested in the group speaking and sharing lines round the circle as suggested before, but now not interpreting the phrases in any animated manner. She now suggests speaking the words in a flat way, without any attempt at variation in intonation or tempo. The focus is simply on feeling and hearing the lengths of the phrases and how this awareness can point to “underlying mood/intention” (Berry 2001:183,184). The group can test this further by spreading out in the space, reading or speaking the text together without expression and changing direction on the punctuation marks. She feels it is necessary for actors to do this kind of technical work on hearing the rhythms in a text before adding their own personal interpretation and allowing the experimenting to then guide further insights into the speaking. This process on language “can inform our acting choices and so help us to enter that other character, and the world the writer has given us” (Berry 2001:184).

All the exercises discussed so far could be applied and in fact, were explored quite successfully, to the contemporary Fugard text which has its own shape and poetry in its structure. Most of these were explored, albeit slightly adapted for this text. I felt we needed to do this kind of exercise more often in the second half of our rehearsal process as one tends to spend more time on the early scenes and the latter ones can be left a little late. The character Rebecca does not speak until the last three scenes of the play (7–9) (Fugard 2002:34–54) and then a great deal of information about her past and her feelings towards Dawid and her mother emerge. The actress had to guard against sounding either a bit mechanical after the long wait for her vocal release or being too emotional. Having an awareness of feeling the length of phrases and sounds, and working through the build-up more technically in terms of breathing and finding the appropriate flow and pauses helped to structure her interpretation. I did not always include the whole group commenting on her text but rather focused on her alone, as she spoke the thoughts and to whom and where in the space she directed these words. It is the first time in scene (7) that she moves into the centre of the room that she has hated and refused to enter properly after eight years. Finding the structure in her speeches through the punctuation in the long and short sentences and particularly noting the repetition of certain lines, the vowel and consonant lengths and definition and the energy running through the accusatory tone, all assisted her in claiming

94

this space again. Her movement downstage towards her mother Marta and around the table where Allison was sitting was also clarified and given prominence. Rebecca starts taking much of the focus in the last scenes and the play drives onto its further surprises and conclusion. Her voice needs to become stronger and clearer as the past is revealed,

He saw his daughter. He saw me. In here. The night before died… I came here. Every day since he came back I’ve been wanting to come here and stand in front of him …but not with forgiveness in my heart. I wanted to tell him what he had done to you, Mommy. I wanted to tell him how you have wasted your life waiting for him―sweeping and dusting and cleaning in here every day as if he was coming back tomorrow. (Fugard 2002:40)

Although much of contemporary writing is spare and minimalistic, Fugard does not fall into this group. Berry puts it succinctly in her view on modern writing after 1956,

there is just as much expansive writing in modern work i.e. the second half of the twentieth century….and there is the same skill in shapeing and rhetoric as there ever was, and it has to be worked on in the same way. (Berry 2001:195)

4.3.7 Obstacles and resistance to the words (Berry 2001:197–200,209–213)

There are not many scenes in the Sorrows and Rejoicings text that have short exchanges of dialogue. So this was an exercise only tried once, but still effective in its intention to enliven speaking between characters and to break up stereotypical responses and set patterns e.g. stressing words in a set way.