Farewell, Cicely Berry, R.I.P.

Alas and alack, the 'Grand Old Lady' of Shakespearean voice production is now silent, having died a few days ago at the age of 92.  I refer to the late, great Cicely Berry who was for very many years the voice coach at the RSC.  I am sort of glad that I never met her in my tiny and very amateurish 'career' as a Shakespearean actor and director.  I suspect her reaction to my efforts would have been even more withering than that of my old RSM when I was a young soldier!

I first became aware of her via the late John Barton's superb TV series Playing Shakespeare which opened an entire Shakespearean universe to me.  From both of them I learned (some of!) the vast intricacies of delivering Shakespeare's lines.  If you have attended a Shakespearean production and been bored to death, it was very probably the inability of the actors to understand the subtleties of the verse and how to deliver it.  The standards reached by the RSC in those earlier years were simply superb and Cicely Berry was a very large part of it.

Perhaps that gloomy Dane puts it best:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

 

 

Comments

[Tony from Adelaide]

I never met her although I worked with a person who had studied under her. Her books are still in my library although I no longer work as a voice coach. I am a huge admirer.

[David Duff]

Good to hear from you, Tony, and as a voice coach I could have done with you 'back in the day'!