Why can’t today’s actors stop mumbling?
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In Hamlet, the Danish prince advises his band of players to “speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you”. Clearly, he would have understood the frustration felt by today’s playwrights and directors with actors who fail to make themselves heard.
Now one of the world’s leading voice experts is issuing a call to arms, warning that there is so much mumbling in live theatre that it risks putting off audiences from going again. In the new edition of Speaking Shakespeare, a manual for reciting the Bard’s words, Prof Patsy Rodenburg makes a plea for actors to speak clearly.
She tells me that actors and front-of-house staff regularly tell her of complaints from audience members who “couldn’t hear a word” and that criticisms of mumbling come “from a deep love of theatre”. “I can’t watch what is happening to it. I see shows I haven’t worked on at least once a week – it’s very rare that I hear every word.”
Such is Rodenburg’s standing in the industry that her criticisms are hard to ignore. Having trained as an actor, she moved into voice coaching, becoming an associate of the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company. For 16 years, she was head of voice at the Royal National Theatre and, for almost 40 years, she has taught at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where she is currently professor of text and poetry. Her latest book, The Woman’s Voice, has just been published.
She has also worked with the industry’s foremost playwrights, including Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller, who were irritated when their words could not be heard. “Pinter once said to me, ‘Can you get that actor clear? Because that’s the best joke I’ve ever written and I can’t hear it.’”
Rodenburg is not the only industry figure to be exasperated by mumbling actors. Playwright Patrick Marber, who made his name with Closer, tells me: “Audibility is really important to me both as a playwright and as a director. I only cast people who don’t mumble because my only requirements of actors is that they learn their lines and they are audible.”
As a director, Marber’s productions include Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard’s most recent play about a Jewish family in Vienna: “I’ve been working with Tom for the last six years. He will say of an actor, ‘They either do or don’t possess clarity of utterance.’ It’s something I tell my cast all the time when we’re rehearsing Leopoldstadt. The clarity of utterance is terribly important when performing Stoppard. It’s thinking through to the end of the line and giving every word its due. It requires an enormous amount of energy and commitment by the actor. But that’s what the playwright wants, and that’s what the actor must give.”
Fellow playwright Michael Frayn, who wrote the classic Noises Off, believes that the trend for mumbling is due to a trend for a “more naturalistic level of voice and clarity”. He adds: “In ordinary life, people speak very unclearly. Elliptically, they leave a lot out. You can usually make that work in the context of ordinary life because you understand the basic situation. But it’s very hard to reproduce that effectively in the arts.”
Actress Glenda Jackson, whose performances on screen and stage have drawn Oscar and Olivier recognition, takes a similar view, believing that the pursuit of realism is partly to blame for inaudible actors: “There may be a problem there – reality being the motive that drives them in that sense.”
The pursuit of realism is not new, however. The Stanislavski technique was pioneered by the Russian theatre practitioner of that name at the start of the 20th century, and became modish when actors such as Marlon Brando adopted it after the Second World War. Yet Rodenburg observes that Brando’s voice still had clarity. “That takes more effort and more craft,” she says.
Tom Morris, former artistic director of Bristol Old Vic, tells me that if the technique of clear projection on stage is lost: “We’ll end up having to over-amplify which will flatten the acoustic experience of theatre-going and take a further step into making theatre the poor, yet over-priced cousin of film and TV.”
Of course, the audibility issue is not just on stage. Audiences regularly complain about mumbling in television drama, a problem so acute that 80 per cent of Netflix subscribers regularly watch with subtitles or closed captions. Over the past decade, hundreds of people voiced their irritation over the sound quality in BBC dramas Quirke and Jamaica Inn, while the long-awaited second series of Happy Valley sparked complaints about inaudible dialogue.
Marber tells me he relies on subtitles and turning up the volume when watching modern television films: “In the old films, clarity of utterance was paramount. I think that somewhere along the line we have lost that in favour of what is known as ‘naturalism’. But there’s a mumbly thing that actors think makes them sound more real. There are a couple of actors who I just don’t bother to watch because I know I’m not going to hear it.”
The award-winning actress Juliet Stevenson, recently seen in Robert Icke’s acclaimed The Doctor in the West End, agrees: “I come from a tradition where part of an actor’s responsibility on stage is to serve the playwright. Any playwright deserves every word he or she has written to be heard.”
Clearly the issue of audibility is one which rankles throughout the industry, and needs to be taken seriously for the sake of the survival of the art form. As Rodenburg says: “It’s putting the enjoyment of going to the theatre at risk. Why would you go again?
The Woman’s Voice and Speaking Shakespeare, both by Patsy Rodenburg, are out now. To order copies, visit Telegraph Books or call 0844 871 1514
