Speaking

“The word is like a little bag into which I put an image or an idea. We send it off into the air like a shell; it bursts, and the idea of the image is parachuted like radioactive fallout on to people’s shoulders. Speech is originally a pantomime of the mouth. There is therefore no break of continuity between a gesture and a word; both of them, physically, are part of the same creation, the result of a muscular contraction and a respiration.”

Jean-Louis Barrault, Souvenirs pour demain, (Memories for Tomorrow: The Memoirs of Jean-Louis Barrault, transl. Jonathan Griffin, 1974.)

Musicality in Speaking

“The pure sound and texture of the words carry an enormous weight of meaning. … The actor must be sensitive to words and appreciate the taste and sound and imagery of a word, even a simple word. Many modern actors … tend to speak the way that they do in everyday life.

What the actor needs to work on all the time is finding the thought behind each word. When you do that you find there is a music in thought.

When King Lear says, ‘Never, never, never, never’ – if you try to analyze this in metric terms, you can never say it truly. Paul Scofield said it differently every single night. Every single time, it had different music. The music was the thought and feeling, so the beat was not regular. The beat is the human beat that can only be found by the actor discovering more and more deeply the true thought and feeling that comes not just from his own thinking but from the actual texture of the words themselves.

In Shakespeare there is such compact thought in each line that if you take the line as a whole it would actually be beyond the human being to think so elaborately. If you listen to the texture of the work, you can discover the sense of music and link it to meaning. It is the difference between Western music, which is all based on a predictable structure given by bars that the composer has set down, and Eastern music, which is based on an awareness of irregular rhythms: There is no regularity.

When the thought and the feeling are right, the music returns; but it isn’t a music that comes from starting with the external structure.”

Peter Brook, interview in American Theatre, May/June 2001.

[YT]: This is what we try to do in mime. To be able to move with the musicality and texture of words and of thought.