Cicely Berry

Celebrated voice director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose unorthodox methods energised a generation of actors

Cicely Berry, vocal coach and theatre director. Born: 17 May, 1926 in Berkhamsted. Died: 15 October, 2018 in Cornwall, aged 92.

Cicely Berry, whose unorthodox exercises released actors’ minds to feel the sound and muscularity of Shakespeare’s verse for nearly a half-century as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s voice director, has died at the age of 92.

Berry was not an acting teacher, but her passionate work as a voice director influenced the stage and screen performances of generations of British actors, including Sean Connery (whom she coached at her home in the 1960s before she joined the RSC), Judi Dench, Emily Watson and Patrick Stewart.

Berry, who was known as Cis, used her understanding of Shakespeare to help actors absorb the rhythms of his language and the weight of his words. It was not enough to grasp his literal meaning, she argued; one had to feel his vowels and consonants and to appreciate the beats of the iambic pentameter in which he wrote.

Only then, she said, would an actor’s voice be capable of evoking Shakespeare’s poetry and musicality.

“When we read a piece of text, our first impulse is to make sense of it,” she said during a workshop with British and American actors in 1996 that was reproduced as a book and a set of DVDS called Working Shakespeare (2004). “The danger is that, having come to a conclusion about the meaning, we often miss out on the surprises within the language.”

In a soothing but commanding voice that she leavened with profanity, Berry took actors at the RSC through movements designed to bring them a new understanding of Shakespeare’s language.

She would tell actors to read, in unison, the prologue from Romeo and Juliet, while appearing to walk aimlessly around a rehearsal room.

“Walking around, speaking it all together,” she said in the 1996 workshop, as the actors meandered while seemingly muttering the words, “frees us and helps us understand the movement of language, and we become familiar with the text without feeling the pressure to do it right.”

She also directed actors to toss chairs and kick beer cans while reciting Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. And she devised breathing exercises and other activities

that included having actors bounce up and down on the floor while reading a passage from Macbeth.

“The exercises took away the fear and overconcentration that actors used to approach Shakespeare,” said Jeffrey Horowitz, founding artistic director of Theater for a New Audience in New York City, which is devoted to Shakespeare and other classics. Berry held annual workshops with his troupe in New York.

Horowitz described one exercise in which several actors held the actress playing Ophelia in Hamlet and had her push against them while reciting the “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown” speech.

“Cis wanted to show that the effort to overcome the physical resistance to the group is the same energy that was needed toreachtheaudience,”horowitz said. “She felt that physical responses to things like her exercises energised the text.”

Ian Mckellen was another admiring pupil. “Her personal approach is almost that of a confidante, relaxing the mind and the body, or of a healer soothing tensions, rooting emotions in reality,” he said in 1976. “She prepares the actor to be a tuned instrument, which may clearly, resonantly, play Shakespeare’s subtlest and grandest notes.”

Cicelyfrancesberrywasborn on 17 May, 1926, in Berkhamsted, north west of London. Her father,cecil,wasacityclerk,and hermother,frances,wasaparttime dressmaker.

Cicely became enamoured with poetry as a youngster, often escaping her boisterous older siblings by retreating to the bathroom to read aloud Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and Auden, sometimes to Micky, her dog.

“Taught myself, read it aloud to myself,” she said in a video interview in 2014 with Jane Boston, an instructor at Central School of Speech and Drama in London, which Berry attended in the 1940s. “I was absolutely obsessed.”

After graduating, she was hired by the school as a voice instructor. Her reputation steadily grew – in part through private lessons with actors like Connery – and led Trevor Nunn, the RSC’S artistic director at the time, to hire her as the company’s first voice director in 1969.

“It was a wonderful, enlightening time to work on Shakespeare,” she told Boston. “I started working on voice, but it quickly worked out that actors would ask for advice or help on a speech, and I’d have to find ways of honouring what the director wanted but find ways to get the actors to get their own responses to the language.”

While at the RSC, she also taught at Nós do Morro, a theatre company in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, as well as in British prisons. She also directed productions of King Lear at theatres in Stratfordupon-avonandlondon,wrote several books, including Voice and the Actor (1973) and The Actor and the Text (1987), and was the dialogue coach for two Bernardo Bertolucci films, The Last Emperor (1987) and Stealing Beauty (1996).

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her sons, Aaron and Simeon Moore anddaughtersaramoore;four grandchildren; and two greatgrandchildren. Her husband, Harry Moore, an Americanborn actor who was later a producer for the BBC, died in 1978.

The cadence, flow and power of language that transformed Berry as a girl in poetry’s thrall guided her into her tenth decade.

“We were working on Thomas Kyd’s ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ a few years ago,” she told an interviewer in 2011, “and the line kept coming out at me: ‘Where words prevail, not violence prevails.’ That’s the bottom line of what I feel my work does.”

RICHARD SANDOMIR

New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.