Berry's Voice and the Text: Three Exercises

Cicely Berry spent more than four decades as the voice director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The actors who came through her studio are the ones who taught most of the rest of us how the language works. Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Sinead Cusack, Antony Sher, Harriet Walter, Jeremy Irons. The list keeps going.

Her work is not a technique in the way Linklater is. It is a way of approaching speech where the text itself is the thing that does the work, and the actor's job is to give it enough physical room to land. The voice opens because the language is asking it to open. The breath organizes itself around the consonants. The thought lives in the muscle of the mouth.

Berry's writing, including Voice and the Actor, The Actor and the Text, and From Word to Play, is also some of the most usable craft writing in the field. Plain, exact, and full of exercises that work.

The premise

Speech is a muscular event. You are not pronouncing a string of words. You are doing a series of small, physical actions with your lips, tongue, soft palate, teeth, and breath. The text is the choreography for those actions. The meaning of a Shakespeare line is not extractable from the act of saying it, because the act of saying it is part of what the language is doing.

This is why so many of Berry's exercises ask the actor to do something physical with the text rather than think about the text. You push against a wall while you say a line. You walk and change direction on every punctuation mark. You whisper a speech and feel where the consonants want to land. You speak it standing on one foot.

The point is never the trick. The point is to find the line through your body so you can stop deciding how to say it and start letting it say itself.

Three exercises to start with

1. The consonant pass

Take a speech you know reasonably well. Eight to twelve lines is enough. Read it aloud once, normally, just to land in it.

Now go through the same speech and only speak the consonants. Drop the vowels. L-ps t-th t-p for "lips, teeth, tip." Do it slowly. Feel each consonant as a physical event happening at a specific place in your mouth.

Then run the speech again, normally, with the vowels back in. What you have done is wake up the muscular life of the consonants so the language has a spine. You will hear and feel the difference immediately. The text gets a body.

2. The owning pass

Stand. Speak a line of your text and, on each operative word (the word that carries the meaning), push gently against a wall with both hands.

You are not pushing hard. You are giving the operative word a physical event so the body learns where the energy of the thought lives. Berry treats operative words as the bones of the line. The line stands on them.

After three or four passes, drop the wall. Speak the line again. The operative words will still feel weighted, but the weight is now in the voice, not in your arms. The text starts to own you, and you start to own it back.

This exercise is also why Memorlined's Operative Words drill exists. Same logic on a screen.

3. Walking the punctuation

Speak a speech aloud while walking around the room. Every time you hit a punctuation mark, whether a comma, a period, a semicolon, a colon, or a dash, change direction.

Punctuation in dramatic text is not grammar. It is breath structure and thought structure. A comma is a half-thought. A period is a landing. A semicolon links thoughts that belong together. A colon points forward to what is coming. Most actors blow through punctuation as if it were noise. Berry treats it as the choreography of the thought.

Walking and changing direction forces you to honor each mark. After a few passes you will start hearing where you were rushing thoughts together, where you were running past landings, where the language was asking for a beat you were not giving it.

How this fits with the other traditions

Linklater opens the instrument before the text arrives. Berry works inside the text. Many actors run a short Linklater-style release to drop tension and then move into Berry-style text work to find the muscular life of the language. Full piece on the Linklater approach in the Linklater entry.

Fitzmaurice sits next to Berry rather than on top of her. Both care about the breath as the active engine of speech. Fitzmaurice's tools come at the breath from a different angle. Full piece on the Fitzmaurice approach in the Fitzmaurice entry.

When to use this tradition

Berry's work is the right tool when you are inside the text and the language is not landing. The voice is open but the read sounds general. The lines are memorized but the thoughts are blurry. The character is talking but the words feel arbitrary.

Run the consonant pass first to wake the spine of the language. Then the owning pass on the line you keep generalizing past. Then walk the punctuation through the speech once.

By the third pass, the text is doing more work than you are. That is the goal. The actor stops delivering lines and starts being delivered by them.