The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen Idecided to make one last-ditch effort to become the kind of listener who could appreciate Siddons. Belatedly determined to listen to Siddons ’s most famous speeches, even if I could only hear them spoken by actors who came after her, I descended into the nether regions of the library ’s media center. A work study student with a Shuf›e clipped to her jeans led me to a listening booth that turned out to be a museum of old recording devices. There was a ›at rectangular cassette player of the kind I used to listen to the Jackson Five when I was in the ‹fth grade. There was a boxy turntable like the one on which my oldest sister played Kingston Trio LPs during the Kennedy administration. There were headphones the size of cinnamon buns. Through careful listening to a daisy chain of Lady Macbeths, I sought to become more like one of Siddons’s original audience members , but I also cherished a secret hope that I would come across some audio vestige of Siddons’s performance, passed down from one actress to another, like the Bernhardt handkerchief that got passed down from Helen Hayes to Julie Harris to Cherry Jones.1 Donning headphones, I began by listening to Fiona Shaw perform Lady Macbeth for the Naxos Audio Book version of Macbeth in a CD format. Fiona Shaw was a breathless Lady Macbeth, who read nearly all of her lines as if she has just run up stairs. When she read Macbeth’s letter, she laughed a little before she spoke the words “Thane of Cawdor,” as if the idea tickled and delighted her. When she delivered Lady Macbeth’s most famous 104 line—“Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here”—she spoke as if she were gasping for air. And when she gave Macbeth his marching orders (“look like the innocent ›ower, / But be the serpent under’t”), she did so with a smile in her voice. The Naxos Audio Book version of Macbeth was not subtle in its use of sound effects. The dripping sounds that could be heard throughout the play intensi ‹ed before Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing scene, as if someone had opened a spigot. When Macduff cried “Awake, awake!” after discovering Duncan’s murder, an alarm clock rang. Perhaps because it was an audio rendering, and because I was sitting in an isolation booth with nothing to look at except a digital display, the Naxos Audio Book version brought home to me, in ways that subsequent watchings of Macbeth on DVD and VHS would not, that the role of Lady Macbeth encourages virtuoso voice work. In the banquet scene, as Fiona Shaw played it, Lady Macbeth switched back and forth between two voices. She used a low, hale voice when trying to calm the dinner guests, and she adopted a high nervous voice when trying to curb her husband’s odd behavior. In the sleepwalking scene, Fiona Shaw had a different voice for every line. She said “Fie, my lord” ›irtatiously , “Where is she now?” furiously, and “Wash your hands” urgently . When she spoke the line “I tell you yet again, Banqo’s buried,” she did so in a furious shriek, but she immediately simmered down enough to say, “come, come, give me your hand,” very evenly, as if she were talking to a child. Subsequent Lady Macbeth recordings did not shake my conviction that the role was made for actresses who could play their voices like musical instruments. When Jane Lapotaire performed the sleepwalking scene for a 1983 BBC production, she said “Hell is murky!” in a tearful voice, and she lapsed into a distraught moan when observing that all the perfumes of Arabia would not sweeten her little hand. She spoke the line “Wash your hands” calmly at ‹rst, but delivered “Banquo’s buried” in a scream. She spoke “To bed, to bed” as if she were warding off a migraine , eyes squinched and hands ›ailing beside her ears. Around the time I was switching from Jane Lapotaire’s Lady Macbeth to the Lady Macbeth of Francesca Annis, it occurred to me that I was reenacting the recording sessions of George Joseph Bell, except that I was scratching notes on a legal pad while sitting in an isolation booth, rather than penciling marginalia on a play script while sitting in chapter fourteen 105 a theater. Also, George Joseph Bell never watched an actress perform the...