Voice and the Actor by Cicely Berry

Author:Cicely Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753546925
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Take the following without the prop, as it is not possible to make ‘s’, ‘z’, ‘f’, ‘v’, ‘th’ satisfactorily with it. Allow the jaw to open as much as possible for this is also excellent as a jaw exercise, as the vowels must be free to form properly.

This series of vowel sounds combined with any difficult consonant combinations should answer any individual problems of consonant agility.

With this added awareness of the length and placing of vowels, and with the muscularity and quantity of consonants, go back over the piece of Dylan Thomas text that you tried earlier. Take the first sentence and speak only the vowels. Be very conscious of the placing of each one, however short it is. Then do exactly the same with the consonants – isolate and speak each consonant or combination of consonants, feeling all their movement and length. Then speak the sentence quite normally, being aware of the movement of vowel into consonant and the precise pattern they make.

Finally, speak it quite normally, concentrating on the meaning. You will find that the meaning itself opens out enormously because of your awareness of the weight of the words. The hurt described is directly related to the physical making of the words. You can experiment like this with the Milton and the Shakespeare texts which I have already given. Hear the difference in quantity in the lines, and therefore the different movement in them. The different weight in words contains much of the meaning, and awareness of this does a lot of the work for you.

Now a word about accents. It is always difficult dealing with an accent as you may feel that if you speak differently you are in some way betraying your background, or at any rate being false to yourself. I think, also, that there is a deep-rooted feeling that a standard accent is to some degree effeminate, and therefore to remove the accent takes away a certain virility in the speech. This is why a man may find it more difficult to deal with than a woman. Class consciousness goes deeper than we care to admit, even though a standard accent is no longer so defined or confining. It is interesting to notice that it is beginning to be fashionable to speak ‘off’, though I think this is a superficial thing which does not go against what I have already said. However, if the balance of the accent is over the edge, it limits the parts you can play and the sounds you can make.

If, however, you concentrate on getting the right muscularity and placing of the vowels and consonants and not on correcting ‘wrong’ ones, you will find you will keep your individuality and at the same time extend the voice to make it able to deal with all kinds of text. The exercises already given, particularly the vowel ones, should answer the problems. Medial vowels are particular to London speech, that is speech that has a cockney flavour but is not actually cockney.

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