Shakespeare and Feminist Performance

Ideology on Stage

Sarah Werner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134588039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How do performances of Shakespeare change the meanings of the plays?
In this controversial new book, Sarah Werner argues that the text of a Shakespeare play is only one of the many factors that give a performance its meaning. By focusing on The Royal Shakespeare Company, Werner demonstrates how actor training, company management and gender politics fundamentally affect both how a production is created and the interpretations it can suggest.
Werner concentrates particularly on:
The influential training methods of Cicely Berry and Patsy Rodenburg
The history of the RSC Women's Group
Gale Edwards' production of The Taming of the Shrew
She reveals that no performance of Shakespeare is able to bring the plays to life or to realise the playwright's intentions without shaping them to mirror our own assumptions.
By examining the ideological implications of performance practices, this book will help all interested in Shakespeare's plays to explore what it means to study them in performance.

1

The ideologies of acting and the performance of women

Although the Royal Shakespeare Company prides itself on being consecrated to the representation of Shakespeare, it is not a traditional ensemble whose notion of the plays can easily be identified. Despite Peter Hall’s desire to create a coherent, European-style ensemble as he transformed the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre into the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early 1960s, the RSC has never been a company with a unified policy beyond that implied by a vague dedication to Shakespeare. It has certainly never been a company that centered on an ensemble of actors. Although the RSC claims that it “is formed around a core of actors and actresses with the aim that their skills should continue, over the years, to produce a distinctive approach to theatre” (Royal Shakespeare Company 1995), the performers in that core do not remain with the company long enough to produce the “coherence that might define a company of actors, a shared knowledge and experience” (Holland 1997: 22). A study of the cast lists over the years reveals a large number of actors who have stayed at the RSC only for a couple of seasons. Although a core group of directors has remained – indeed the presence of only four artistic directors in almost thirty years suggests some continuity – recent years have seen a growing reliance on outsiders. Without an ensemble of actors, a consistent circle of directors or a clearly articulated company policy, the RSC identity is largely driven by and maintained through the presence of Cicely Berry, its long-time voice coach. As Peter Holland argues, “Berry’s status within the company as a cross between coach and first-aider ensured that her principles of work continued to exemplify the RSC style” (1997: 23). This has proved to be the case even when the directors and actors were unfamiliar with or uninterested in the veneration of language that has become the company’s hallmark.

Not only has Berry helped to develop a coherent RSC style, she has made that style influential throughout Anglophone theatre. Berry joined the RSC in 1970 as the first full-time voice coach to be associated with a theatre company in Britain and is widely hailed as one of the most influential voice teachers in English-language theatre. Her method of training actors has influenced not only those who have worked at the company in the last thirty years, but those actors and voice teachers she has taught at the Central School for Speech and Drama (an influential institution in the teaching of voice and the only drama school to offer a postgraduate certificate in voice work), those with whom she has worked in prison and school workshops and in private sessions, and those actors, teachers and non-theatre practitioners who have read her books, Voice and the Actor (1973) and The Actor and His Text (1987). The principles of her work have also spread through the practice of Patsy Rodenburg, a colleague of Berry’s at the RSC for nine years, the creator of the voice and text program at the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival, the founding and current Head of Voice at the Royal National Theatre, Head of Voice at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and author of her own successful series of books, The Right to Speak (1992), The Need for Words (1993) and The Actor Speaks (1997). Although there are important differences between their coaching techniques and philosophies, Berry and Rodenburg have fostered ways of working with voice and text that often overlap and are often perceived as teaching aspects of the same method. Between these two women, we can trace an arc of influence that covers Britain’s two most prominent theatre companies, two of Britain’s most prestigious acting schools and countless numbers of readers and workshop participants throughout Britain, the United States and Canada, as well as numerous other nations worldwide.¹ In order to evaluate performed Shakespeare today, we must first interrogate the method and ideology of voice work.

Over the last twenty-five years, Berry’s and Rodenburg’s books have served to formalize and disseminate their way of reading and performing the plays, reaching out to all potential readers and unifying us in a desire better to understand Shakespeare and ourselves.² Although their access to a wide audience makes these texts influential, they are not completely representative of their authors’ training practices; a number of theatre practitioners have commented to me on the books’ occasional distance from their authors’ studio methods. This distance should not detract from their value as objects of study. If, as Richard Paul Knowles points out in his important examination of voice work, “it may seem unfair to interrogate printed texts written by voice coaches and teachers rather than the methods they employ in their studios and rehearsal halls,” it is also true that “as texts, these books encode and reinforce ideological structures and assumptions that are both deeply embedded in theatrical discourse and too easily overlooked or mystified when their methods are applied in practice” (Knowles 1996: 93; emphasis in original). Certainly the consistency in each author’s body of writings suggests that their written work is not random or accidental, but can serve as a cohesive introduction to their philosophies of voice and acting. The close reading encouraged by voice training can be turned on the trainers’ texts themselves to capture those moments of mystification and reveal the social practices that determine the parameters of actors’ performances.

While voice and speech training have long histories in the acting community, the current method influencing the RSC stems from Berry’s work with Peter Brook on his 1970 A Midsummer Might’s Dream, which she repeatedly describes as crucial to her development as a voice coach (Parker 1985: 33, Berry 1992: 20 and Berry 1997a: 95–6).³ The concerns central to theatre practitioners in the late 1960s and early 1970s were also central to the development of Berry’s method. Like Brook, Berry believes in the value of empty space (Brook 1968), though for her, that empty neutral arena becomes the body itself: if the “Shakespeare revolution” demonstrated that a literal and metaphorical empty space was necessary to allow Shakespeare to speak for himself (Styan 1977), voice work posits that a similarly empty space needs to be cleared to allow us to find our true voices and speak for ourselves (Knowles 1996: 93–94). Although for academics the importance of voice work usually lies in its readings of the plays, for these voice teachers its importance lies equally in its ability to recover this healthy space that allows our best, natural selves to emerge. Shakespeare is not incidental to this process, and in his role as author he assumes the figure of benevolent guide to our natural selves.

The fundamental connection between voice and self can be found throughout these texts. Your voice, Berry tells us, is not only “the means by which you communicate your inner self (1973: 12), it is your inner self: when you breathe in deeply, “you are touching down to your centre, you are finding the ‘I’ of your voice” (1973: 22). Rodenburg also takes as a starting-point this belief in the link between voice and self, explaining that our voices reveal “the deepest parts of ourselves” (1992: x) and that work on the voice “can liberate and transform both our use of language and our sense of ourselves” (1993: xv). Those who work with Berry and Rodenburg take this fundamental connection as the root of their praise for the women. Peter Brook’s highest tribute to Berry, that “after a voice session with her I have known actors speak not of the voice but of a growth in human relationships” (Berry 1973: 3), is one echoed by later actors and directors: Trevor Nunn’s foreword to The Actor and the Text (the revised title for the 1992 reprint of The Actor and His Text) and Antony Sher’s foreword to The Need for Words both laud Berry’s and Rodenburg’s personal warmth and strength as human beings. Ian McKellen’s foreword to The Right to Speak praises Rodenburg as well, but specifically her strength as a woman and a feminist; he is the only one to comment on the fact that most prominent voice teachers are women. Ultimately, these forewords highlight what the texts themselves will tell us – that working on the voice is about working on ourselves to become better people.

The reason that we need actually to work on our voices is that the modern world has blocked our natural and truthful ones. As Brook’s foreword to Voice and the Actor summarizes, “Cicely Berry has based her work on the conviction that while all is present in nature our natural instincts have been crippled from birth by many processes – by the conditioning, in fact, of a warped society” (Berry 1973: 3). This fall from Eden is a theme played out through all these texts, but is particularly present in the three later ones. Berry connects our difficulty concerning the speaking of heightened text with the fact that “We live at a time when people are less articulate about their feelings” and that, as we become more educated, “our response to words becomes only literal: we stop feeling the emotional life of the language” (1992: 48). She is even more vehement about this situation in her conclusion to the 1992 reprint of The Actor and the Text, focusing particularly on our “product-oriented society” in which television and advertisements have made language “either passive and literal, or to do with selling a commodity” (Berry 1992: 286). Rodenburg also faults the “civilising barriers” of modern life (largely in the form of technological advances like television and a generally chaotic urban culture) that have impeded “language’s ancient mesmerising power” (1993: 4–5).

However, although Berry and Rodenburg write of finding your own natural voice, which is free and organic and rid of the problems that block its innate power, the voice they strive to produce is not as neutral as they suggest. Both coaches insist that a good voice is one that is “natural,” free of the bad habits and societal forces that have warped our untrained voices: Berry argues that “the condition of life conditions the speech,” listing environment, ear, physical agility and personality as the important factors (1973: 7–8); Rodenburg devotes the first part of her book on voice to the myriad “bad habits” that keep us from our “right to speak” (1992: 1–109). For both, the operating paradox is that it is the untrained voice that is constructed, while training recovers the voice’s natural state. But the examples Rodenburg invokes of those who have managed to escape “civilising barriers” and have retained access to their powerful, natural voice highlight the ways in which that voice is far from neutral. Rodenburg’s continued references to finding vocal power “throughout Africa, India, Aboriginal Australia and the Far East, in small pockets of Europe and in North America among Native American cultures” (Rodenburg 1993: 8), along with her praise of a “Black American gospel singer” (1992: 10–11) and Antony Sher’s approving description of Rodenburg as a “pioneer, or missionary, braving real and urban jungles” (Rodenburg 1993: xiv), suggest that what is at stake in a natural voice is a fetishized notion of primitivism, which requires repressed Anglo-American speakers to go in search of a less-cultured expression of emotions. Although it is Rodenburg in particular who is susceptible to this nostalgia for the primitive, Berry also relies on a move towards it: we should stay “free to our basic primitive response” to language, she argues, “primitive in the sense of being less consciously organized, and less culturally based” (1992: 19).

Given this drive, one could imagine that the connection between Shakespeare and voice work is merely coincidental: both Berry and Rodenburg happened to work at a company whose primary focus was Shakespeare. But even that in itself is not coincidental – the RSC had both the resources to hire a full-time voice coach in 1970 and the impetus to create itself as a unified, ensemble company – this reasoning overlooks the degree to which Shakespeare is a central means by which voice work produces healthy, neutral voices. As Knowles points out, British voice coaches long relied on providing actors with voices they could use in a variety of roles and media, and the RSC was striving to present itself as a company whose work could be appreciated by the entirety of Britain, not just the elite (1996: 92–93). Both these factors affected the development of voice work and the belief that Shakespeare’s plays represented both the best texts and the most universal characters for the purpose. In fact, given these voice coaches’ concerns with a quantifiable quality of text and voice, and their preoccupation with a common essence that we all have within ourselves, it is hard to imagine their work without Shakespeare.

The combination of the link between voice and self and the importance of Shakespeare creates a very specific way of reading the plays. Just as our primitivized self is made “natural” through voice work, so is Shakespeare. Voice work, particularly in its late 1980s and 1990s incarnation, is about making Shakespeare’s language “organic,” a word that recurs not only in this method but throughout theatre practice. “Organic” is generally used to refer to the way in which everything in a production gives birth to everything else; a good production is then one that forms a coherent and, as the biological metaphor implies, a natural whole. In these books, “organic” refers to the way in which words and voice are physically part of our bodies: Rodenburg insists that “words that respond to need flow through us, practically becoming part of our circulatory system, touching every part of us” (1993: 3) and Berry continually reminds us of the physical response that we can have to words (1992: 19–20). Shakespeare’s language too is organic, grounded in the physical reactions of our bodies. “There is no way you can possibly begin to enjoy Shakespeare without speaking him aloud” (Rodenburg 1993: 32), because our physical response to the feeling of speaking his words creates not just our enjoyment, but our understanding: “If you speak and sound enough of Shakespeare’s texts you will soon understand them with greater ease” (Rodenburg 1993: 170) and “with Shakespeare, more than any other writer, you have to speak the text out loud and feel the movement of the language before you can begin to realize its meaning” (Berry 1992: 52).

The reason that speaking Shakespeare helps us to understand his plays is that the meter and thought patterns of his verse create a biological link between his characters and ourselves. Meter, which is the “cornerstone” of speaking and understanding Shakespeare (Berry 1992: 52), is “organic to the thought” (Berry 1992: 53) and so, gives clues about the character speaking: “when the rhythm breaks within the text it does so because the character, to a large or small degree, is at odds with his [sic] natural rhythm” (Berry 1992: 53). This is not an intellectual reaction to the text, but is linked specifically to the behavior of our bodies. Iambic pentameter, Rodenburg tells us, is “like a heartbeat or the beat of the pulse: the first rhythm we hear in the womb, the last we feel before death” (1993: 136). This is not an unusual way to describe the nature and popularity of iambic pentameter, but for these voice coaches, it is specifically the physical aspect of the meter that makes it a valuable resource for the actor: “Like our inner biology the iambic responds to pressure, tension and stimuli” (Rodenburg 1993: 137). Both we and Shakespeare’s characters have pulses that respond to and indicate our emotional states, and it is this pulse that enables an actor to become a character. Even aside from the strict counting of iambs, there are physical connections between the actor and the text through patterns of breathing: “You begin to breathe at the same points as the writer, your heart beats with his or her rhythm, you imaginatively move with the writer across time and space” (Rodenburg 1993: 96).

If this sounds a bit specious, Berry’s explanation of the importance of breath patterns is more rooted in language and character analysis. Taking as her starting-point the assertion that breath is “the physical life of the thought” (Berry 1992: 26), she argues that there is an “integration of breath and thought” and that “how we breathe is how we think; or rather, in acting terms, how the character breathes is how the character thinks” (Berry 1992: 26). If we can focus on this integration, we will learn how to think like the character: “we have made the thought our own physically through the breath” and “actually think differently because we are open to the thought in this way” (Berry 1992: 26). Through this method of reading, voice work strives to naturalize Shakespeare, to root the understanding of his language in the physical responses of our bodies.

By making Shakespeare himself part of our natural voice and body, voice teachers seek to empower the actor to wrestle with the plays’ language. Both Berry and Rodenburg repeatedly assert that there is nothing to be afraid of in speaking Shakespeare. The language might appear difficult, but it is something that we can all understand since our bodies respond to Shakespeare’s words. This desire to make the actor feel comfortable approaching Shakespeare plays a crucial role in how the practice of voice work has developed. Making Shakespeare a part of our bodies has practical and ideological implications for how the plays can be read. A naturalized Shakespeare is not a Shakespeare we are tempted to question. If it’s natural, it’s good – can we imagine striving for an unnatural Shakespeare? In many ways, the later phase of voice work participates in the American self-help culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s that urged us to get in touch with our emotions and sought to make our emotional and physical lives a coherent whole.⁴ Where the catch-phrase of this self-help world was “release your inner child,” in voice work it is your inner Shakespeare that you are urged to find.

In effect, Berry and Rodenburg want to heal our twentieth-century neuroses by bringing us closer to the Shakespeare within. Through this physical connection with him, we will learn how to uncover our more primitive voices and selves, uncontaminated by cultural conditioning. This desire for a healthier and more primitive self appears innocent, but it carries an ideological bias that limits the work an actor can do. In voice work, what you discover as your free, individual voice links you both to the common humanity shared by everyone who can strip away their culturally and consciously imposed barriers and to Shakespeare, who is simultaneously you at your individual best and humanity at its collective best. As Knowles argues about these texts, “what ‘freedom’ will do for actors is to restore a ‘natural,’ ‘childlike’ access to ‘self,’ a psychological ‘depth’ that puts them in touch with something that is at once their true (individual) selves, our common (universal) humanity, and Shakespeare” (Knowles 1996: 97). This conflation of individual/ universal/Shakespeare naturalizes the social order found in the plays and thwarts challenges to their political tenets. We are Shakespeare; Shakespeare is us. Not only are we not encouraged to be skeptical of the natural, organic Shakespeare that we discover through voice work, the reliance on interpreting individual character’s psyches frustrates the ability of the actor to interrogate the larger social structures that shape the depictions of those characters. Instead of the plays deriving from or responding to historically and culturally specific ideologies, they become timeless reflections of our essential human nature. Interpretations grounded in an historicist or materialist framework have no point of ent...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General editor's preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Local habitations
• 1   The ideologies of acting and the performance of women
• 2   Punching Daddy, or the politics of company politics
• 3   The Taming of the Shrew: A case study in performance criticism
• Epilogue: The language of theatre
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index