The art of theatrical language - it's how you hold your tongue

By PETER CALDER

At the back of a lounge in the Auckland Town Hall, a couple of dozen young actors are eating their words.

With relish, mind. They savour the lines as they might a rare delicacy. Vowels trickle from the tongue, or trot through the teeth. Consonants explode off roofs of mouths, pop on the lips, catch on the soft palate behind the tongue.

If they were sitting at a table for this feast (they're not; they speak their lines while leaping or kneeling or lying or waggling their backsides) the man at the head of the table would be Andrew Wade.

The head of voice at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the "verse consultant" on the film Shakespeare in Love, Wade, a participant in the Ignite 2001 Festival in Auckland, was in the country for more than a week on a mission to help actors - and anyone else who will listen - make the best of what he calls their "thought muscle."

"Language is just movement in the mouth," he tells the group and proves the point by taking them through a passage of Shakespeare - a chorus speech from Henry V - and leaving the consonants out.

Shorn of the sounds which punctuate the voice and lend meaning to its drone, the speech becomes, indeed, a feast of expressive movement and Wade makes a meal of it, his mouth and face contorting wildly as they strain to invest the vowels with sense.

It's impossible, even as an onlooker, not to contort along and the next read-through of the speech ("Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies") is unrecognisably energised as a result.

It's a telling choice of text, containing as it does a phrase about giving "order ... to sounds confused." That's what Wade does - and it's a long way from the starched pronouncements of prehistoric elocution teachers.

"Elocution," he says, "implies a set way and a right way of saying something. I don't work from that premise. What we are trying to find is the energy of communication."

He encourages his students to attempt the most grotesque exaggerations as a way of finding the tiniest subtleties. "Throw your arms around and do all that Royal Shakespeare stuff," he says, self-mockingly.

It may be at odds with the less-is-more tradition of late 20th-century acting, but Wade says it's vital to explore what the playwright has written if the words are to mean anything.

"How does the thought change if you actually explore the line?" he asks. "It's a matter of getting self-consciousness out of the way."

The vowel-only exercise was strikingly reminiscent of a baby's expressive coos and Wade observes that in speech, as in many aspects of life, growing up means losing the openness of childhood, which he tries to help people to rediscover.

"The turning point is the word," he says. "When we start acquiring language, it has so many layers of complexity about it - not just grammar, but what it means in society, who we are. And that affects the way we relate to the basic instrument of language - the voice."

The use of language as an instrument of persuasion - technically known as rhetoric - is the essence of good theatre, he says.

"We know that Shakespeare was taught rhetoric in grammar school in Stratford. It was a third of his education, the art of persuading when you speak and write."

And it's the persuasive pause which drags the listener through.

"The human ear can take in seven or nine words without a pause. So if someone is giving a speech, they must know that's an element - creating expectation."

The glory days of the English stage knights - Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson - created a tradition of rich, orotund delivery which long since went out of fashion. Is Wade's work evidence that the pendulum is swinging back?

"That's what every generation is trying to find, the way that Shakespeare is speaking for now. That's why you can't fix it in some set way."

It's plain that Wade avoids telling actors what to do. He sees himself as offering new insights into the language, particularly of Shakespeare, but of all playwrights.

That so much of Shakespeare's work is in what's called blank verse (technically known as unrhymed iambic pentameter) can offer clues to how it might be spoken, but Wade's not going to say how it should be done. "I'm not of a school that says this is how it has to be. You just have the right to know that Shakespeare wrote that form and how you respond to it."

As the head of voice at the RSC, Wade is part of the day-to-day process of company work, he says, and voice is fundamental to what goes on there. So he does not find himself having to deal with stars whose egos have been bruised by criticism of their delivery.

"Every actor wants to act better and if any of your work can be of value they will take it. But I do sometimes joke that if I hadn't been a voice coach I might have been a diplomat. It's a skill I've had to develop."

And while he spends more than three-quarters of his time on Shakespeare, the techniques adapt easily to modern work.

"Every piece of writing, contemporary or classical, is based on form to some degree. It's about the shape of thought. It may not have metre in it or all these rhetorical devices but in the end there is still a music in those thoughts."

Wade plays down the mention of the hit film Shakespeare in Love in his CV. He did a workshop with the cast on day one of rehearsals and worked with the film's fictional company of players on ways of opening out Shakespeare's language.

"But I wasn't even there for the whole thing and if you look for me on the credits, I'm just after 'doghandler'."