Cicely Berry, whose unorthodox exercises released actors’ minds to feel the sound and muscularity of Shakespeare’s verse for nearly a half-century as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s voice director, died on Oct. 15 in Cornwall, England. She was 92.
Her daughter, Sara Moore, confirmed her death and said Ms. Berry had recently had two small strokes.
Ms. Berry was not an acting teacher, but her passionate work as a voice director influenced the stage and screen performances of generations of British actors, including Sean Connery (whom she coached at her home in the 1960s before she joined the R.S.C.), Judi Dench, Emily Watson and Patrick Stewart.
Ms. Berry, who was known as Cis, used her understanding of Shakespeare to help actors absorb the rhythms of his language and the weight of his words. It was not enough to grasp his literal meaning, she argued; one had to feel his vowels and consonants and to appreciate the beats of the iambic pentameter in which he wrote.
Only then, she said, would an actor’s voice be capable of evoking Shakespeare’s poetry and musicality.
“When we read a piece of text, our first impulse is to make sense of it,” she said during a workshop with British and American actors in 1996 that was reproduced as a book and a set of DVDs called “Working Shakespeare” (2004). “The danger is that, having come to a conclusion about the meaning, we often miss out on the surprises within the language.”
In a soothing but commanding voice that she leavened with profanity, Ms. Berry took actors at the Royal Shakespeare Company, one of Britain’s leading theater organizations, through movements designed to bring them a new understanding of Shakespeare’s resonant language.
She would tell a group of actors to read, in unison, the prologue from “Romeo and Juliet,” while appearing to walk aimlessly around a rehearsal room.
“Walking around, speaking it all together,” she said in the 1996 workshop, as the actors meandered while seemingly muttering the words, “frees us and helps us understand the movement of language, and we become familiar with the text without feeling the pressure to do it right.”
0 Σχόλια