Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self

Listening to Actors

55 Listening to Actors Striking, memorable acting is often bound up with effects created by modifications of the actor’s voice. Stanislavsky summons Salvini’s testament on the point: “When Tommaso Salvini, the great Italian actor, was asked what one must have to be a tragedian, he replied: ‘Voice, voice, and more voice!’“1 Salvini is not alone in singling out the voice as a crucial tool for potent acting . Chaplin repeatedly declined offers to make his tramp talk. “This was unthinkable,” he writes, “for the first words he ever uttered would transform him into another person.”2 John Barrymore’s groundbreaking performances of Richard III and Hamlet in the 1920s—­ his transformation from a lightweight comedian into a great Shakespearean actor—­ involved a thoroughgoing metamorphosis of his vocal technique.3 Simon Callow presents vocalization as no less than the key, authenticating, role-­ establishing component of a believable theatrical characterization: I had installed the play into my brain. Only one thing was missing: I had no idea how Molina should speak. I believed I knew him, as a man, his speed of thought, his camp vivacity, his neatness and would-­ be daintiness; I saw, too, the emotional openness, the sexual need, the instinct for subservience, for service; and I had a most vivid sense of his dream life, filled with the myths he had drawn from his obsession with the screen, and especially with love goddesses. . . . I saw all this, and felt it in my bones and in my muscles. I could become Molina at a moment’s notice. Except for one thing: how the hell did he talk? The voice is almost invariably the starting point for me: until I hear the right sound coming out of my mouth, everything sounds false, out of tune, and my body ceases to behave as it should. I feel awkward, blocked.4 Callow conceptualizes voice production as if it somehow emanates from an external entity, in his need to “hear the right sound coming out of [his] 56 acts mouth.” Producing an imprecise voice is rendered problematic in several distinct ways: Callow feels false, unexpressive, distorted, out of synchronization . The stress is less on the mechanics of vocalization—­ tonal range or smooth diction—­ but on a linkage between genuinely inhabiting a character ’s world and mastering its voice. Intriguingly, since there is no preexisting voice that the Molina character simply possesses and which the actor aims to discover, “hearing the right sound” seems to appeal to authenticity that is not predicated on correspondence; an unspecified criterion of adequacy underlies Callow’s own assessment of his success. Callow subsumes the import of voice to a vague distinction between authentic vs. inauthentic fictional embodiment. He is not alone. When RSC voice trainer Cicely Berry speculates why otherwise hardworking actors shun intense work on their voices, she writes: I think many young, interesting actors shy away from working on voice because of this restrictive attitude. Quite understandably they do not want something so personal interfered with and sounding well produced; they distrust it for the fear their individuality will be lost, and in any case it is not relevant to what they feel.5 Fearing the loss of authentic expression, actors avoid experimenting or refining such an intimate part of their being. Rather than capture their feelings , the trained voice threatens the performer with artificiality; a “well-­ produced” voice is not only removed from the realm of raw, unembellished life, but dooms everyone to sound like everyone else. Why is the voice singled out, and what is its precise relationship to compelling acting? The response echoing from both Callow’s and Berry’s remarks is that, like eyes, voice is intimately associated with an access into another’s “interiority.” But interiority is a concept that needs to be unpacked: why and in what sense does the dramatic voice tap a highly intimate dimension of another mind? States and Thoughts The following remark by Stanislavsky hints at what may be misleading in the authentic/inauthentic schema: Listening to Actors 57 When an actor with a well-­ trained voice and masterly vocal technique speaks the words of his part I am quite carried away by his supreme art. If he is rhythmic I am involuntarily caught up in the rhythm and tone of his speech, I am stirred by it. If he himself pierces to the soul of the words in his part he takes...