Speech for the Stage

Evangeline Machlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136555077
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

From its original publication, thousands of actors have used this classic text to develop and refine their voice and speech. Evangeline Machlin includes warm-up routines for the voice but initially focuses on the importance of listening. She also discusses such important elements as relaxation, phonetics, articulation, resonance, pitch, rate of speech and stress. In addition, there are chapters on dialects, on reading aloud, sight reading, auditioning and performance.

1

Listening and Learning: Speech Appreciation

Of all wonders, none is more wonderful than man, Who has learned the art of speech.

SOPHOCLES

THE PURPOSE of this book is to help you to develop good speech for the stage. It begins with listening, which is the basis of all speech acquisition. When you were an infant, you listened for almost a year before you began to speak. Your first random efforts at speech imitation were sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful. The successful ones were rewarded with response and commendation, and your hearing prompted you to repeat them correctly. Now that you intend to retrain your speech for the stage, you must once more begin by listening.

All human speech involves simultaneous hearing and speaking, with the ear as the feedback system for the brain. If you make a mistake when you speak, perhaps mispronouncing a word or transposing sounds as did the Englishman who cried, “How pleasant to ride a well-boiled icicle!” your ear will tell you so at once. This corrective return is all-important for you as an actor. Your ear must be a good corrector. It must warn you not only of gross faults in your speech but also of less obvious ones like low volume, dull tone, or slurred articulation. Learning this fine kind of discrimination through the ear is a vital part of your speech training. It is accomplished by listening to speech as a musician listens to music, for pleasure, pure and unadulterated, and also for profit. The musician profits through analyzing what he hears, noting the dynamics of the performance, studying the tone quality, observing the pianissimo and fortissimo passages, and appraising the skill of the performer. A player himself, the musician will presently apply this critical analysis to his own technique with great benefit. Similarly, your ear will gradually acquire the same kind of skill in analyzing speaking voices, especially those of actors. Listening closely and often to live actors and to records of the best speaking voices of this century, you will gain a thorough knowledge of what speech qualities you need most—breath control, resonant tone, clear articulation, and variety of pitch, speed, and stress.

This chapter has been placed first in this book because the training of the actor’s ear should underlie and accompany all his other work. Only when your ear is sharpened by disciplined listening to catch such tiny sounds as the intake of John Gielgud’s breath, for example, before a great cry in one of his Shakespearean recordings will you realize exactly what you must accomplish in breath control to achieve a like perfection. It is the same with the other techniques of speech. “Hearing and obedience!” as the slave used to say to the Caliph in Arabian Nights, is an excellent attitude for your voice to take towards your ear. You should begin your listening program now, and hereafter organize it around your studies in each chapter, listening especially to tone quality when you are working on Chapter 7, to the articulation of sounds with Chapter 8, and so on.

Attend the legitimate theatre as much as possible. If you have to be content with a seat far from the stage, you can make a virtue of necessity by noting what kind of voices are easiest to hear from a long distance. See a play more than once, and as you get familiar with the script, watch the actors’ speech as well as listen to it. Howard Taubman has pointed out in the New York Times that many American actors are desperately handicapped by bad speech habits. You should judge for yourself whether or not you agree with him.

The speech of actors in movies, on television, and increasingly on records and retakes has been so much regulated in electronic reproduction that it is less valuable for you than actors’ live speech. Such speech often has to contend with poor theatre acoustics, fatigue, and all the other hazards of the stage. If it is successful, you will gain by observing and learning from it. Yet television speech can yield you profit too, if you turn off the sound from time to time and watch only the mouth movements of the speakers. Suddenly the role of these movements in shaping the sounds of speech becomes exceedingly clear. The agility of tongue, lip, and jaw movements, if the actor’s speech is well articulated, should be most instructive for you.

For your listening studies, you will need access to a record player, a tape recorder, and a supply of speech records, primarily of recorded plays. Your school or college may possess sound equipment and a good library of speech recordings. If it does not, you should begin to make your own record collection, following three principles of selection. First, choose chiefly voices of good American actors. Second, choose plays (or prose or poetry) of literary merit. Third, in general, choose a play recording that was made by the original cast of a successful production of the play during its run. Such recordings reflect the life and fire of the real performance, the timing that audience reaction evoked, the pitch builds evolved through many rehearsals, the pauses, and the bursts of speed, everything that may make your listening experience parallel to one in the live theatre. Studio recordings made by a group of actors called together to read a play sometimes lack these qualities. These recordings are less suitable for your purpose.

You should listen to readings of poetry and prose, as well as to plays. Listening to a theatre voice in short units, reading poems or prose beautifully or comically (as the case may be), is often very rewarding. Choose by the actor or actress, not by the selection.

Listen chiefly to American actors and actresses. There are plenty of good ones. At this writing the recorded voices of Jane Alexander, Mildred Dunnock, Tammy Grimes, Julie Harris, Katharine Hepburn, and Lee Remick are available, among others. Long-established professional actors like Ed Begley, Lee J. Cobb, Joseph Cotten, Henry Fonda, Bert Lahr, E. G. Marshall, and Zero Mostel have also been recorded. The original cast recording of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf features many interesting women’s voices. That of The Boys in the Band includes a variety of men’s voices.

English actors’ voices do not now sound as clipped as they used to. No longer is “received speech”—the speech of the British aristocracy—demanded on the English stage. Today there is much back-and-forth travel of actors between London and New York, and we are used to mixed casts of British and American actors in the same play. A transatlantic modified British is what we hear. For this reason, you should listen to the best actresses—Claire Bloom, Maggie Smith, Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Worth—and the best actors—Albert Finney, Alec McGowen, Cyril Ritchard, Paul Scofield.

Do not overlook the very greatest voices, those of the British stage personalities of this century who were honored with titles by the Queen. Among the women, try to hear Dame Edith Evans, Dame Flora Robson, and especially Dame Sybil Thorndike—she of whom Shaw cried, as he met her, “Here at last is my Saint Joan! I can produce the play!” In her old age, Miss Thorndike confessed that she still kept up her voice exercises. She was a grande dame of the theatre: People said, “Sybil swept into her eighties like a ship in full sail!” As for men, try to hear Sir John Gielgud, Lord Olivier, Sir Michael Redgrave, and Sir Ralph Richardson. Many of the great Shakespeare performances made in the fifties and sixties by these and other actors are no longer listed in the catalogues, but your school library may still have them. Check a recent catalogue for others.

In earlier decades some play productions in America and Canada were theatrical events of the century. You need not miss these merely because you were not born then. Those that (happily) are still available you should hear. One was the Stratford, Ontario, production in the fifties of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, with the great Canadian actor Douglas Campbell in the leading role. The climactic moment of the play was the dreadful scream Campbell gave at the moment he discovered his true identity. It was so harrowing a moment of catharsis that in 1980 Harold Prince declared he still remembered the scream. Another masterpiece of the theatre was the production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman with Mildred Dunnock and Lee J. Cobb. Hear it and understand the compelling nature of Miller’s best play performed by incomparable artists. Equally unforgettable was Paul Robeson’s Othello in the forties, his artistry lost to us in all but this recording. With him were his near-equals: José Ferrer as Iago, the young Uta Hagen as Desdemona (later to earn plaudits in a contrasting role as Martha of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and Margaret Webster, the great English actress-director, as Emilia. Pay close attention to the jealousy scene between Robeson and Ferrer, particularly when the latter, with superb finesse expressed in the most subtle inflections, hints at Desdemona’s infidelity with Cassio:

OTHELLO:	(Speaking of CASSIO) Is he not honest?
IAGO:	My lord, for aught I know.
OTHELLO:	What dost thou think?
IAGO:	Think, my lord?
OTHELLO:	Think, my lord!
	By heaven, he echoes me
	As if there were some monster in his thought
	Too hideous to be shown.

The time to listen to a Shakespeare play in its entirety is when you are cast in one. If it is Hamlet or King Lear, listen to all the Hamlet and Lear recordings your library has. You will understand your lines better—and find your own interpretation of them more rapidly—when you have heard how others solved the problems of speaking Shakespearean blank verse. Study the way different actors handle the run-on lines, the long speeches. What was the speed? What was the pitch-range? Can you, with your native American, match the crisp consonants the British use? With practice you can.

Aside from plays, there are three recordings of Shakespeare that outshine the rest. The first and the best of these is Homage to Shakespeare. It was produced in England in 1964, Shakespeare’s quadricentennial year. To do him honor, all the greatest actors contributed readings, so that we have on one record the best work of the best. On it you may hear Olivier, Gielgud, Worth, Evans and others, each reading passages from different plays—another virtue of this recording. Especially distinctive is Olivier’s Othello; he chose not a violent speech but a calm one. Beginning with “Her father lov’d me,” he explains to the Duke in quiet, low-pitched tones how Desdemona fell in love with him simply by hearing him talk with her father. Any actor wanting to learn what has well been called “the emphasis of restraint” should listen to it.*

The second great Shakespearean record, one that also uses material from many plays, is Sir John Gielgud’s Ages of Man, called “a masterpiece” by the Times when it was produced. To see and hear Gielgud perform one splendid sequence after another was a profound experience. He was on the stage alone throughout; yet when he impersonated Lear in the scene with the murdered Cordelia, his cry “O, ye are men of stone!” to those supposedly present seemed to fill the stage with actors. Nor was there a dry eye in the sophisticated New York audience at the lines

No, no, no life! …

Thou’lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never …

Finally, listen to John Barrymore, whose greatest Shakespearean soliloquies have been preserved by AudioRarities. His opening speech as Richard III, his “Ah vengeance!” monologue as Hamlet, will change any room into a theatre as you listen. Certainly the style is that of a past day, but it is spellbinding, even though melodramatic.

If you feel you have the comic gift, listen to the voices of artists like Hermione Gingold, whose madcap recordings create as hilarious a mood as did her stage appearances. The deliveries of Victor Borge, Flip Wilson, and Stan Freberg will let you hear timing, the essence of comedy. From the long list of humorous recordings available, choose the voices you know from the stage or TV. Concentrate on and learn from your favorites. Comedy is a great and rare gift, and an individual style is part of it.

You may also listen to theatre voices reading poetry and prose. Later in this book, you will be asked to try reading aloud to young children. Study recordings made for children by good actors. Silver Pennies, with Cyril Ritchard and Claire Bloom reading, is among the best. The book Silver Pennies is an outstanding collection of poems for children, some simple, some fantastical, like

The moon? It is a griffin’s egg

Hatching to-morrow night …

Children love best uninhibited readings, and these, along with Boris Karloff’s inimitable recording of Kipling’s Just-So Stories, will show you how an actor’s voice may range tremendously in pitch, in stress, in speed, and in the use of pause, with the attention-getting result the actor needs.

Do not neglect recordings of the untrained voice. You can learn much about the differences between the trained and untrained voice, for example, by listening to the voices of poets reading their own poetry. Listen to the young Sylvia Plath, then to the older Marianne Moore. Listen to Robert Frost’s gritty voice reading his poems in his old age, still able to hold an audience.

Documentary recordings, of which a growing number are becoming available, supply listening studies of several kinds. One is the study of a public figure’s speaking voice to discover how character is expressed and felt in vocal elements. Another is the study of authentic regionalisms. A third is the study of how speech beh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword: to the Student
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures
• 1 Listening and Learning: Speech Appreciation
• 2 Listening and Learning: Speech Analysis
• 3 Projecting Your Speech
• 4 The Speech Instrument
• 5 Relaxation for Speech
• 6 Breath Control for Speech
• 7 Resonance in Speech
• 8 Articulation and the Phonetic Alphabet
• 9 Variety in Speech: Pitch, Rate, and Stress
• 10 The Speaking of Shakespeare
• 11 Dialects for the Stage
• 12 Reading Aloud, Auditioning, and Performing
• A Listening Library of Records
• Bibliography
• Appendix A: Exercises for the Correction of Faults in Speech Tone
• Appendix B: (a) The Actor’s Practice Routine (b) The Actor’s Warm-up Exercises
• Appendix C: Advanced Exercises in Speech Techniques
• Index