Words Into Action by William Gaskill

Author:William Gaskill
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781780011202
Publisher: Nick Hern Books
Published: 2018-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

11

Phrasing and Pauses—Congreve and Beckett

When I listen to actors reading I don’t look at the text but try to understand what is being said, as if I were hearing it for the first time. Occasionally I stop and say, ‘Is that a full stop or a comma? I can’t tell.’ I don’t mean, ‘Have you observed the punctuation?’ but rather, ‘I can’t hear whether your thought has got anywhere. Is it complete?’ Too often a sentence is left hanging in mid-air. For me the only punctuation invariably to be marked by a pause is the full stop. Commas, colons, semicolons, are aids to understanding, and sometimes breathing, but only the full stop shows whether the actor has understood the progression of the writing. In that sense the believers in ‘actioning’ are right. If the actor is not living in the moment and is already thinking of his next sentence he will not finish the thought of the one he is in. He does not commit himself to the line as part of the development of the play. A text is built up of phrases, of which the most defined is the sentence, and the phrases may need pauses either for breath or clarification. It is the actor’s business to find them and to build his performance from them. A play is like a score, but, unlike music, it translates not only into sound, but into the action of which sound is a part. And it is not the sound of the words but their meaning which makes it part of the action. The audiences of today may have less response to words than previous generations, but actors must still learn the relationship between text and action, between the shape of the words on the page and their performance on stage.

Punctuation varies from writer to writer and from century to century. Here is some of Hamlet’s first soliloquy as it appears in the First Folio:

That it should come to this:

But two months dead: Nay, not so much; not two,

So excellent a King, that was to this

Hiperion to a Satyre: so loving to my Mother,

That he might not beteene the windes of heaven

Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and Earth

Must I remember: why she would hang on him,

As if encrease of Appetite had growne

By what it fed on; and yet within a month?

Let me not thinke on’t: Frailty thy name is woman.

How does it differ from the Oxford editors’ version (see page 79)? There are no dashes before ‘not so much’; this and the other interjections are marked by colons. There are the capital letters on certain key nouns. There is no question mark after ‘must I remember’ and a rather odd one after ‘within a month’. It looks more staid than the modern edition. Does it make much difference for the actor? The exclamations still interrupt the flow of the speech, there are still the insistent repetitions of ‘within a month’ intensifying but holding up the articulation of the main clause. The character of the speech is the same and will be found by the actor whatever the punctuation.

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