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At Stratford in the 70's, the text was all! And there, for the
first time, I tackled the problem of how to speak it. I had three
mentors - John Barton, again; Trevor
Nunn, another Cambridge friend; and
Cicely Berry, the voice coach for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Cis is
small and shy, yet she radiates the energy of a healer, as she lays her
hands on your back, your ribs, your neck, your forehead, soothing the
body so that it can breathe freely and confidently. She encourages the
voice to express your individuality and be responsive to the character
you are playing. Your diaphragm muscle below the lungs, pumps air from
the body's centre, guiding it up over the vocal chords, its passage
hindered by nothing but your emotion, so that feeling and sound are
projected as one, over the lips, to sail along the air, where they
strike the audience's eardrums. Cis teaches the intimacy of acting,
regardless of the size of the auditorium. Actors and audience should be
physically connected — that's why I hate the mechanical aids of
microphone and loudspeakers.
 John
Barton's lessons are different but equally illuminating. He gets
together half- a-dozen actors, who singly learn a Shakespeare sonnet and
present it out loud to the rest of the group. It becomes a
self-contained speech, without any context of scene or play to
complicate matters. John then analyses it into the ground, whence, if
you're lucky, it grows, nurtured by his knowledge of the myriad devices
and flexibility of Shakespeare's poetry. When it comes to blank verse,
he is omniscient and it took him nine hour-long television programmes
(PLAYING SHAKESPEARE) to say the half of it. It was astonishing how few
of my colleagues at Stratford had time for the Barton classes. They
believed, perhaps, his reputation as a purely academic director.
Rubbish. John Barton is Mr. Show Biz. If a speech or scene isn't working
on its own in one of his productions, he will happily shove a bit of
atmospheric music underneath. He loves sound effects and smoke and dry
ice and elaborate scenery. When I came to do THE
WINTER'S TALE with him, I found that the notoriously complex text
had had all the difficult lines cut out of it. I was playing Leontes
and, benefitting from my classwork, I did my newly-trained best. For
reasons never explained, the production had three directors, who divided
up the scenes between them for rehearsing. I cannot invent a metaphor
ridiculous enough to describe the confusion this caused. The play was
botched.
  
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