The Voice Squad

The Age

Saturday January 26, 2008

Daniel Ziffer

In the theatre, the audience (and success or failure) hangs on every word, writes Daniel Ziffer.

OUR VOICE IS AT THE heart of who we are.

From dawn to dusk and, for some, through the night, how we speak articulates our hopes, our doubts and our intentions.

It changes as we age, suffer illness or alter our geography.

It illustrates the largest and smallest moments of our life.

But for those who work on the stage, it's more than a way of getting a meal order across or telling someone what time to expect us home.

For actors, the construction of a voice illuminates a character and enables them to convey to an audience the journey they are attempting to share - right up to the cheap seats.

Stars of Monty Python's Spamalot have endured a very specific demand on their acting skills - to produce a multitude of character voices to please both the movement of the story and expectation-filled audiences familiar with the production's source material, the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Accents are carried and used by actors but are rarely considered in our natural voice. Lucinda Shaw, who plays the mysterious Lady of the Lake, says a visit to the US last year for a Spamalot workshop made her re-examine how she felt about her Australian accent. "They talked a lot about it; that they like our accents, that they think they sound jarring," she says.

"It's nice that a lot of actors over there are speaking as themselves, I like that," she adds.

The General American tones preferred in US films and in the mass media have been conquered by actors such as Cate Blanchett and Russell Crowe. The resultant sound is a compilation of regional accents, inferring the actor could be from anywhere in the US.

But actors do come from somewhere and Ben Lewis, who portrays Sir Galahad, describes the forward placement of the typical Australian voice warmly. "We have that twang, which is a brighter sound," he says. "The brighter edge is actually what carries and cuts through. So we naturally have a sound which lends itself to voice use. Having that innately in our culture helps a lot."

Other actors have mused about how Australia's diverse make-up has contributed to a way of speaking that doesn't jar on the world's collective ear. Because voice conveys who we are, especially if we want it to.

New Zealand born screen actor Alan Dale is perhaps best known in Australia as Jim Robinson on Neighbours but since moving to Los Angeles has appeared on hit US shows such as The O.C., NCIS and Ugly Betty. Dale played a cabinet member on The West Wing and even played the US vice-president on 24. He tries to make his voice "work" for him around the globe, he says.

But off-screen, at home with wife Tracey, he's just Alan. "When we got there (the US) I said to Tracey we should really give this a go and do it (the accent) full-time," he said. "That lasted about 30 seconds. Now I put it on like a coat and take it off when they say 'cut'."

Billie Brown

King Arthur

FROM BILOELA, THE SMALL Queensland country town where he was born, to traversing the globe as an actor, Billie Brown's voice reflects his past, in all its glory.

"Inevitably, the fact that I lived 12 years in the UK and nearly 13 years in America means that I have the voice that I have," he says. "I was born in Queensland at a time before television, where it really was the world of radio and the pictures and there was no embarrassment about speaking up and speaking well."

Every day, in his primary school classes and at home, he was taught to read and recite. Through a long theatre apprenticeship in England, mostly in Stratford, the 56-year-old has used his voice to entice, cajole and intrigue. "I was a football referee growing up, so part of the thing was just running and shouting," he says, laughing. "You! No. 3! Do you want an early shower?"

Brown has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in addition to his writing and directing work, and treasures the contribution voice makes to performance.

"Even if it is an absurd fairy story," he says. Interactions and intonations propel people's connection to the text, he says, steering them through the story. "In a musical which is as lurid a fruitcake as this one, the relationships - acknowledged and internal - will make it right."

In Spamalot his character projects a regal air, which may or may not be justified. Brown thinks that putting on accents and voices is the "hardest thing in the world" and was encouraged to not impersonate (Monty Python's) Graham Chapman but rather to try and inhabit the role himself. "(Director) Mike Nichols, who I trust, says whoever you are, however odd or strange, that's where you start."

John Cleese, he says, told him of the Pythons' amused reaction to "the bluster" of the actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Voices were played with in rehearsal. "It just happened," Brown says, describing the hours he spent working up a sense of gravitas and then grounding it as the story progresses. Now it just appears, he says, with Brown not speaking in his character voice backstage, before uttering his character's first lines. "He comes to you. It's a fascinating thing. You just have to take that leap of faith. You actually can't pretend to fly, you have to do it. He slips in."

But he also slips out. Brown recently had another play published - and he composes them in his Queensland accent. "I notice the rhythms, the intonations, rather than the sound of the voice. All the forces acting on the voice come from the last vestiges of the squattocracy, a sort of imagined gentility," he says. "But also people did talk, they sang. Loudly."

Lucinda Shaw

Lady of the Lake

FINDING A VOICE FOR A character is hard. Finding one for a character who communicates almost entirely through song can only end in tears. "I remember one night I crawled into my kitchen and just lay on the table," Shaw says, recalling rehearsals. "This is never going to happen!" she roared at her flatmate. "I can't do this!"

The 23-year-old's role in the production is to appear at crucial points and sing the show along. A role dense with songs but light on script. "My character doesn't find her voice, until act two."

Shaw attempted to create a neutral, internal tone. "She's Orstralian but with English influences, kind of like Kylie Minogue," she says. "It's a very worldly accent. It's tough."

The show used an English director and an American choreographer and musical director, which added to the difficulty of building a stable voice for the character, she says.

"I would be singing and the director would say, 'she sounds American'. And the American would say, 'what's wrong with that?' The English director would be like, 'well, she should be English', and then the American would say, 'well, she wasn't English in America." Shaw laughs, clamping her forehead at the memory. "One person saying it's too warm, another saying it's not warm enough, it's not genuine - so many different opinions from all these people who I held is such regard. So, one night I just picked up my script, I went 'right', went into the fire escape, where it was really echo-y and just played and played and played."

When she arrived at rehearsals, having worked on one scrap of text for hours, the directors were stunned. "The penny's dropped. You've got it," she was told. "And I just had".

Previous work as an understudy for three roles in We Will Rock You and for the title role in Dusty - The Original Pop Diva prepared Shaw to alter her tone. "But the more extreme an accent, the easier it is to play," she says. Delicacy is what is difficult.

"Dusty was an English woman who had an ultra-feminine round, soft voice. The accent coach would say to me, 'say that word again'. It was blood, sweat and tears."

The emotional tug of the underlying love story in Spamalot - beyond the glitzy costumes and big numbers - comes through the few voiced words her character shares with Arthur, Shaw says. "Which I had never thought about. You can play a scene but in the tone and the delivery and the warmth you have it can affect the audience and affect people on stage."

That said, future roles with words might come easier.

"It's definitely a challenge to have a character who doesn't talk," she says, smiling sweetly.

Ben Lewis

Sir Galahad

RAISED BY OPERA-SINGING parents and spending his childhood in and around the Sydney Opera House, Ben Lewis had a dream - to play cricket for Australia.

It wasn't until he went to university that he started performing.

"There was no shortage of noise in our household," he says. "I feel like I've been around voice-users all the time. If you're tired you just don't talk."

Performing as a knight, every night, Lewis likes to "bash and crash" his voice through the medium of his outlandish, dashing character Sir Galahad.

The 28-year-old also plays a peasant Yorkshireman, "a 50-year-old man who weighs five times as much as me" at the opening of the show.

"The danger with Python is that everybody knows the voices already," he says.

"And there's a tendency to just put on a silly voice but that never works, it just sounds like you're doing a bad impression of Michael Palin, or whoever."

So the team "mucked around" during rehearsals to build their own sound.

"Once you've rehearsed them in - the costume, the character, the voice - they all become one," he says. "As soon as I get the father (character) on I muck around with my wiggies and dresser (backstage crew), he's a dirty old man backstage. I jump straight into it."

Blessed with a basement dressing room, Lewis lets rip before each show, bellowing and working himself into the roles. He can't just flip the switch, he says, as Billie Brown does.

"He's a lucky man," he says. "But it's horses for courses. Lucinda has to come out and hit 150% from the first bar of music and I find I too have to be pretty warm to start off with, that everything's well oiled and ready to go."

His girlfriend notices the English influence of his character when he is off-stage, he says.

"I lived there for about six years during my secondary school years so it's not that difficult for me to click back into it.

"It's often when my mates come out, I start to 'pik i' up agin'. It's quite easy."

It is common for actors to become neurotic about their voice, he says. "But doing eight shows a week you just can't be. You've got to be fearless, get in and give it a go. It's just another tool that you've got, like your body. And the more ways you can use it the better."

Monty Python's Spamalot is playing at Her Majesty's Theatre.

www.montypythonsspamalot.com.au

© 2008 The Age

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