The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  I was surprised to learn when we met that Ms. Berry had only just joined the RSC when Peter Brook began to rehearse his production. And I came to believe that what she and Brook did with voice and verse-speaking adds something to our understanding of the secret play that made that production spectacular.

  She’d been invited there in 1969, she told me, when Trevor Nunn, then just twenty-nine, took over as artistic director and felt the need, for the first time, to bring in a full-time verse-speaking specialist. In part she said it was because Nunn felt that many talented actors were being drawn to Shakespeare from film and television; they had enormous gifts but lacked classical or Shakespearean voice and verse training and thus had trouble filling the vast space of the Memorial Theatre at Stratford, which was the company’s home, and often a graveyard to those whose voices could not carry into its depths. And because Nunn had been impressed with the vision Ms. Berry (now C. Berry, O.B.E.) brought to the concept of voice. Then she met Peter Brook and their collaboration brought out something in that Dream that changed both their work, changed contemporary Shakespeare—in addition to changing lives like mine with its electrifying clarity.

  Our conversation began with the question of musicality in Shakespeare verse-speaking. As it happened, the morning before meeting Cic Berry I had been watching a videotape of the 1936 George Cukor film of Romeo and Juliet, which featured Norma Shearer as Juliet, and more to the point here, and most memorably, John Barrymore as Mercutio. It is said to be the only sustained filmed record of Barrymore doing Shakespeare. It was exactly the sort of Shakespeare Peter Hall, Peter Brook and Cic Berry sought to displace.

  Barrymore came from one of the great American Shakespearean dynasties, successors and rivals to the Booths, and he was said to have an Edmund Kean–like swooning-and-faint-inducing power over audiences with his tragic roles. The conscious musicality of his voice can seem hammy to the modern ear, but its vibrancy is impressive.

  At fifty-four in Cukor’s Romeo he’s a bit too old for Mercutio, but everybody in the cast, the lovers and their friends anyway, looks too old. They remind you of illustrations of the “robustious periwig-pated fellows” that “tore a passion to tatters” as overaged Romeos in engravings from David Garrick’s age.

  Not only is Barrymore too old, but he’s way old-fashioned-sounding, at least at first. He takes us back, not to original Shakespearean acting, whatever that was, but back a century or so at least, to the florid, musical, operatic style of nineteenth-century Shakespeareans which one can hear still in some rare preserved Edison-era recordings that go back to 1890. And yet the sheer Mozartian beauty of the music in Barrymore’s voice is astonishing. It was this vibratory musicality that I found somehow resonated with Cicely Berry’s work, and what she achieved with Peter Brook’s cast in the Dream.

  I learned something about musical, harmonic vibrancy in verse-speaking practice from watching Cic Berry work with the Julius Caesar cast during the previous week’s rehearsal period and had begun to get an intimation of the method to the magic she evokes. The day before, for instance, she called the cast up onto the stage, had them all lie down and begin producing a vibratory series of hums, ahhs and oms that sounded at first like some Eastern monastic practice, but were designed, she said, to get the cast vibrating both individually and in harmony and to expand the space within them where the voice lived. Expand it downward, expand the internal volume of space—the theater within—an internal stage on which the voice played.

  If it sounds a bit touchy-feely perhaps there’s an element of that. But I recalled one Shakespeare scholar compare Peter Brook’s concept of “the Empty Space” (the title of his vastly influential book on his methods) with Cicely Berry’s voice work: what Berry was doing, this scholar argued, was taking Brook’s “empty space”—his phrase for the void theater must fill with life—and internalizing it. For Cic Berry the empty space, the empty stage, was a space inside the body and must be brought to life within, in the form of sound and voice, before the empty space in the theater outside can be brought to life.

  I’m always thrilled to watch any aspect of Shakespeare in rehearsal, the way a production is built from parts (literally) into a whole. But in watching Cic Berry I felt I was witness to a search for a deeper level upon which to found the voice—the vibratory physics of the sound as it shaped itself into language. Getting to watch Cic Berry, I thought I was watching some elemental force in the history of Shakespearean performance, the force that infused the Royal Shakespeare Company’s best work.

  For the work the day before I met her for lunch, Cic Berry began (after the vibratory hum exercises) with a speech not from Julius Caesar but from Hamlet. The notorious “Pyrrhus speech.” The one that Hamlet called for the Player King to recite when he first arrived at Elsinore. The one that had Hamlet envying the Player King for driving himself to tears in describing the plight of the widowed queen, Hecuba, standing before the body of her slain husband King Priam, while his killer, Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, exults in gory triumph (“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?”)

  Cic Berry handed out sheets with the Pyrrhus speech to the company. And asked them first to recite it together.

  Hamlet himself begins it like this:

  The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,

  Black as his purpose, did the night resemble

  When he lay couched in th’ ominous horse,

  Hath now this dread and black complexion smear’d

  With heraldy more dismal: head to foot

  Now is he total gules, horridly trick’d

  With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,

  Bak’d and impasted with the parching streets,

  That lend a tyrannous and a damned light

  To their lord’s murther. Roasted in wrath and fire,

  And thus o’er-sized with coagulate gore,

  With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus

  Old grandsire Priam seeks.

  This is only Hamlet’s part of the recitation; he then hands it off to the lead Player, who goes on for more than fifty lines to further describe the slaughter in gory detail.

  I think Cic Berry chose the Pyrrhus passage both for its sound and its savagery—a primal early-Shakespearean savage energy not inappropriate for Julius Caesar, where ostensibly civilized politics is undergirded with bloody havoc. With Caesar’s own “coagulate gore,” the blood into which conspirators ritualistically dip their hands.

  So what Cic Berry had the cast do was, first, chant the lines together. Then she told them each to take a line and had the cast recite the passage one line per person. Then she had some chant their own line quietly to themselves while the rest of the cast continued to chant them in succession. Then she had them start running around the theater chanting their individual lines. Then she had them continue to run around the theater, only this time when she called “Stop!” each would vocalize his line from whatever location he was in, then run around some more until she called “stop” and they vocalized it from another, different, location.

  Over and over—it is her belief that in doing so she imbues the actors with a kind of physical manifestation of the movement of thought from line to line. The movement of thought that she believes should go on within the actor, within his voice, as he speaks the lines from a different place, a different space in the mind. And each time he speaks it—sometimes she has them whisper it, hiss it—it must be communicated to someone opposite them in the theater. The day before, I’d seen this exercise work in practice: actually bring some crackling energy to a previously rather lackluster exchange between the actors playing Brutus and Cassius.

  At this point, with the bloody thrum of the Pyrrhus speech vibrating in the cast, echoing in the mind, in the diaphragm, and pervading, somehow, the entire theater, she turns to Caesar. I’m abbreviating the process but it culminates with Ms. Berry drawing the cast together in a knot in the middle of the stage and asking each cast member to sing their favorite line from Caesar. They b
egan with someone breaking into a simple “Hail Caesar” which was then taken up chorally by the whole cast, which then retreated to a choral hum as the soloist continued with “Hail Caesar.” Until someone else broke into “He doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus.” With beautiful call and response, choral and solo recitatives that seemed to become imbued with the emotion of the line, which somehow shaped the line into a melody with vibratory harmonic undertones. Then a beautiful woman’s voice (the voice of the woman playing Brutus’s wife, Portia) sang out the embittered line “Brutus’s harlot, not his wife.” Then after the choral responses and reiterations, the other woman in the cast, who played Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife, took up “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood”—giving the line a lovely spooky lunar embodiment. Finding its musicality.

  The origin of this complex choral exercise shouldn’t have been surprising. When I asked Ms. Berry about her family background, she told me that she’d grown up poor in the London suburb of Berkhamstead, didn’t have an early transformative Shakespearean experience, although she says “I was besotted by poetry from about age three.… But my father was interested in music, he used to train the church choir.”

  It suddenly clicked for me: the choral roots of the exercise I’d seen the day before.

  At that time, in the forties, voice-teaching was mainly a kind of polite art known as “diction” taught by devoted spinsters, and although verse-speaking training was a recognized part of an actor’s preparation, it was rare that verse-speaking specialists were attached to a company, even a Shakespearean company, until the Royal Shakespeare Company brought in Cic Berry as a resident specialist and brought her unusual methods of verse-speaking to the fore with the kind of excitement the language of their productions was generating. She had come to the attention of Trevor Nunn through her work in the Central Schools of Drama in London and the work she did with several well-known actors whose names she’s reluctant to disclose.

  By that time she’d been influenced by some, if not all, of the lessons of Method acting (her late husband was a Method actor), not all the overhyped “sense-memory” methods. You might say she believes Shakespeare’s language itself serves the function of a kind of built-in “sense memory” for the actors. The Method’s emphasis on internalizing is important, but for her it’s not necessarily the actor’s internalized emotional biography but the internal dynamics of a character, dynamics to be found deeply embedded in the words themselves. And then she met Peter Brook and they made theatrical history together.

  And what I came away from my conversation with her feeling was that the secret play, so to speak, within the language of Brook’s Dream had to do with the vibratory dynamics of those vocal exercises. Let me explain by returning for a moment to the musicality of John Barrymore’s Mercutio. Cic Berry doesn’t favor film Shakespeare, she says, because “one loses the drama of the present moment,” but she is not incapable of appreciating some of the present moments, now past, that film preserves.

  I mentioned the Barrymore Mercutio I’d just heard to her, and its vibratory, virtually trilled, musicality. “There’s a part of us that enjoys that sound even now,” she says. “You know I work in prisons”—she’s well known for doing Shakespeare and other theater with locked-down prison populations—“and it appeals even to some very rough people.” (On second thought this might not be the tribute to my taste she sweetly made it seem at the time.)

  Anyway we’d been served our lunch—we had met in a tiny Village place called Tartine near the theater and it’s a tribute to Cic Berry’s own voice that amidst the loud and claustrophobic conversation and clatter surrounding us, her voice came through with ringing clarity on my tape recorder—and I brought up the question of vibratory phenomena in Shakespearean language, both in Barrymore and in the work I’d seen her doing with the Pyrrhus speech the day before.

  “I find that area very interesting now,” she said. “Finding that kind of [Barrymore] vibration in the voice and yet keeping it sounding new, that’s very tricky now.”

  She spoke of the different approaches to language of the three main directors at the RSC when she arrived. Trevor Nunn, who liked a more intimate, informal Method-like approach, “so lovely, so truthful.” Terry Hands, “very much the opposite, very much for beating out the rhythm, going fast and loud,” a rhythmic style that was “particularly suited to the history plays. When he put them together, as in his Henry VI plays, it became one long poem, they were quite stunning.”

  And then “John Barton of course who is famous for finding the antithesis”—for focusing on a fundamental rhetorical method by which Shakespeare built his speeches: through oppositional phrases, most famously in “To be or not to be” but shot through the rhetoric of his most complex and beautiful verse.

  “It was an amazing grounding for me, finding these different approaches to the language and the text. But when I worked with Peter Brook he gave me the confidence to really work on text.”

  I mentioned to her that I’d read somewhere that someone had made the comparison between Brook’s use of the term “the Empty Space” as a starting point for thinking about theater, and what she did with voice, that what her work did was internalize Brook’s Empty Space, locate it, the space of drama, within the body, make the interior the stage for the voice as it embodied speech and thought within.

  “You really read that somewhere?” she said. “Oh! Oh!” expressing surprise, humility and pleasure eloquently with those two lovely vowel sounds. It was the first and perhaps only reaction of that sort I managed to evoke. She’s a very pleasant and good-natured woman, and yet very canny in not revealing much about the specifics of her dealings with famous actors and directors (except perhaps Peter Brook) because there are so many sensitive egos to consider when speaking of British Shakespeareans.

  And voice- and verse-speaking certainly has not escaped contentiousness. I’d asked her, for instance, if she favored using the Folio punctuation for stops and starts (punctuation RSC founder Peter Hall believes has no foundation in evidence for attributing to Shakespeare as opposed to type-shop compositors). She said, “I don’t mind about what system of punctuation, but I do a lot of exercises at the beginning of rehearsal when I get actors to move and change position on punctuation. And then they begin to see how thoughts are sometimes very even, other times thoughts are just jumping around.”

  “Getting people to run around and say these thoughts from different places in the theater,” I asked, “for the actors is it like getting thoughts to rocket around to and from different places in themselves?”

  “I do a lot of work on that, very specifically on character. For instance what you saw with Brutus and Cassius the other day”—when she had the two actors run around the theater and exchange words across the space from different vantage points—“and Paulina in The Winter’s Tale”—the deeply moving speech where the outraged handmaiden of the unjustly slandered wife of Leontes denounces the jealous king—“if I get her to do that speech moving around the space, changing direction on every punctuation mark, she suddenly gets the sense of the beating in the blood in her speech.”

  The beating in the blood … It comes back to a drumming of sorts, a tympanic systole/diastole heartbeat rhythm.

  It occurred to me to ask her, since sound-and-heard rhythm is so important to her verse-speaking work, if she had an image of how Shakespeare might have written these rhythmic lines. “Would he have spoken them out loud and then have written them down?”

  “I think he would have heard them in his head,” she said. A fascinating distinction. In the beating of the blood, in his brain, perhaps.

  At this point a heretical anti-Originalist thought occurred to me. I’d asked her how important she thought it was to get back to or approximate the way Shakespeare and company might have spoken the lines when they were first performed.

  It’s interesting, but not necessarily possible to know what the original was, she said. And here’s where
the heretical thought occurred to me: Perhaps in some rare instances such as the Dream she and Brook worked on, we are hearing Shakespeare spoken and performed better than the original. Earliest isn’t always best or most “Shakespearean” necessarily. Recall that Shakespeare’s actors may well have had little sense of the entire play, or of the other actors’ parts. According to a fascinating work by the Oxford scholar Tiffany Stern (Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan), all they were given were “cue scripts,” which contained the last line or few words of the actor speaking before them, followed by their own speech. Which suggests that Shakespearean actors didn’t have the organic awareness of the whole with which to inform their parts—not until something approximating it might have developed in performance eventually.

  By contrast the goal of the work Cic Berry and Peter Brook evolved together, beginning with the Dream, was to somehow make the whole play resonate in every part. Make every character’s part, every character’s word, every character’s being, resonate in every other character’s part, by making every actor’s voice resonate somehow in every other actor’s voice.

  She talked about some of the exercises she and Brook would do at the RSC. “There’s one where we give each actor a line and they would have to go round in the theater and experiment with the space, seeing what will carry, giving them a sense of lifting the voice, not going higher in pitch. It’s very subtle but we do a lot of ‘carrying language around.’ ”

  Carrying language around? “We’d get in a circle, take any speech from Shakespeare, say it round [hand the line from one actor to another] so it’s like one person speaking at the end. So you become very aware and sensitive to other people’s rhythms and other people’s pitches and vibrations. It doesn’t mean you sound like them, but that you carry that energy on.”

  I think it finally made sense to me: “So you’re saying each actor is responding to the others’ sounds and reverberations, and incorporating their reverberations into their own reverberations, which then become slightly altered, and that alteration is then incorporated into everyone else’s reverberations and echoes, which themselves become altered until each part contains the whole?” I asked. “Is this what you mean when in your books you speak of developing a ‘collective voice’ in rehearsal?”