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The
actor's voice: Work on productions But work on productions is also something I do, and here the focus is more on the play than the individual. Here again the role of the voice person tends to be underrated. Directors will routinely bring in movement specialists while remaining oblivious to what a voice person can do. I can best illustrate this by reference to a particular production that I saw recently, a very successful one in most respects, which typified of the kind of need I’m suggesting. The show was in a very large theatre with a notoriously difficult acoustic. Though it had been running for weeks there were serious audibility problems affecting the majority – though not all – of the cast. The more I watched, the more it became clear that the problem was not with audibility in a narrow sense, but with the company’s relationship with the text. The specific weight and cadence of the author’s language had not been found with sufficient exactness, and this was disabling the speech. What a voice person attached to a production can do – mainly by providing brief but preferably regular, precisely tailored warm-ups at the start of rehearsals is … Enhance ensemble by unifying the voice and speech style of the company. Help actors to find the value of their words and to connect to them with greater depth and authenticity – that is, finding the meeting point between the actor’s voice and the “voice” of the author and character. We have all seen productions rich in every respect but that the speech has been mundane – all subtext and no text Help find the verbal rhythm, which of course then feeds into the dramatic rhythm. “…
adds a new dimension to every theatre production he is involved in” |
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