6 Listening

Listening accurately is one of the most important factors in using the voice fully, for the accuracy with which we listen relates directly to how we respond vocally. It is something which we tend to take for granted because it is such a basic simple thing.

People tend to listen much less accurately in daily life than they would care to admit. As you listen you are preparing for what you are going to say or do after you have finished listening. The mind is split and is coming to conclusions before it has fully heard. An over-simplified example of this is when you are being introduced to several people, or when you are being given directions of how to get somewhere. Frequently you forget the names or directions very quickly, not because they are more than you can remember, but because the mind is racing ahead to what you are going to say or do after you have finished listening. This is a crude example which is obviously complicated by each individual situation, for the situations themselves will be loaded with other considerations.

This, in another form, is true of the actor. When rehearsing a piece of text, either by himself or in actual rehearsal circumstances, he too often is forming conclusions of what the text should sound like or what he should be presenting before he has discovered what he is actually saying and what the text can say. This of course is part of the actor's situation, the pressure that comes from being judged and the anxiety to present a finished product. But, unless he allows himself time to listen for the possibilities within himself and the text, and unless he allows time for those possibilities to affect him, the vocal result will always be predictable. In his relationship with the other characters he must give himself up wholly to listening so that what they say can affect him. It is only by being this open that the voice will respond freshly and that it will be surprising. It can then take the actor himself by surprise.

When you are past the rehearsal stage and go into performance the situation is, of course, different. You know the course of the scenes, your relationships, your motives, and you know what you as a character need to say — that is your discipline. But the listening is still important, for the excitement lies in the fact that you are hearing it at that moment and that moment is different from any other moment. Your response is, therefore, for that moment only. If you have the confidence and energy to allow this to happen then the voice will be surprising. This, of course, is why you need the voice free through the practice you do, so that it is able to respond with this degree of awareness.

Is it feasible to do this when it would seem to take a long time to work this way? Ultimately it does not take longer. With breathing, when you become accustomed to taking the breath right down inside you the rhythm of breathing is just as quick. Similarly with listening and receiving: it is getting used to the whole rhythm of work that is important and just thinking about it in these terms is a great part of the battle. Of course, it is the rehearsal situation that makes it difficult to take time; it requires a kind of pressure to do so and a certain resistance from other individuals. It is interesting to notice that the act of listening very often sets up the same sort of tension in the back of the neck and head as happens when you are speaking. This tension affects the freedom with which you can think and, therefore, respond. It is also interesting to notice just what tensions happen in the neck when in fact all you are doing is listening. Once you are aware of it you can use the increased facility you have in relaxation.

Practically, you can familiarise yourself with this whole rhythm of work by using any of the material I have included in this book or any of your own choosing. Take time to read it aloud, not coming to any conclusions but listening for what the words and rhythms contain. Initially you will find every word has significance but gradually, as you become familiar with the text, the image and the particularness of the writing, the words will take their own value in relation to each other. The weight on the individual words will vary enormously, the unweighted words being important in that they lead you on to, the weighted ones, and the rhythm of the whole will begin to emerge. It is this relative value of words that you must notice. Take in one thought, speak it, and allow it to lead you to the next.

The Chorus to Act IV of Henry V, which I included for work on breathing, is a marvellous passage to see just how this can work. If you examine the first sixteen lines, for example, you will find that the description is so spare that every word matters. For instance, the very first word catches with its immediacy, and each image has to be palpably seen or heard and experienced so that it is real to you. In other words, you have to get in a frame of mind which can accept the terms of the description of the world as a wide vessel. As you become familiar with the detail you can allow the rhythm to take you because, as in everyday speech, you understand through the rhythm as well as through the individual word. You can hear that the suspensions at the end of the lines are an essential part of the meaning, as is the punctuation which gives you the different lengths of phrases and so the different movement. You hear how some phrases are fuller than others and how the rhythm is gathered for a moment on certain words to allow the image to impinge. If you listen for

what the words and the rhythm tell you it is extraordinary what vitality it awakens in you. No word should be taken for granted yet the overall rhythm into which they fit needs its freedom. You can do the same with the rest of the passage where it goes into details of the mood of both the French and the English camps. But it is the beginning passage which is particularly interesting.

I suggest three passages, two of which I include here, to help you to go further with this kind of exploration. One is Part 3 of East Coker, from the Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot; this and the Hopkins poem both have tremendous possibilities for neither make any statements — their purpose is to discover. If you become emphatic or present a conclusion with either of them you will cut out their reverberations. If you receive the words and allow them to 'touch down', they will take on a meaning which is particular to you. The passage from East Coker is about our fear of death and the unknown and our search for wholeness, the moment of reality and of being. Eliot juggles us from one level of consciousness to another, from one kind of language to another — from Samson's first cry at his blindness into very informal everyday language, and then to the mystical utterance of the end. It is a continual discovery of feelings which are not quite tangible but which are part of a primitive consciousness. The Hopkins poem is also about death. It describes growing old and the loss of innocence and therefore beauty; but in the end you are brought to hope through his own religious belief. The music comes from the way he uses the words and not out of an idea of a cadence. The words answer and echo each other in a curious way yet always taking on the sense. Eliot makes you sensitive to the precise weight and measurement words have: Hopkins charges the ear with sound and makes you open to an area where the sound influences and changes the sense. The extract from Shaw's Man and Superman is totally different. It is didactic and full of ideas but he puts over his ideas through enquiry. The listener has to be open to that enquiry and he can only be so if he allows the ideas to be fully realised.

THE LEADEN ECHO AND THE GOLDEN ECHO

(Maidens' song from St. Winefred's Well)

THE LEADEN ECHO

How to keep — is there any any, is there none such, nowhere

known some, bow or brooch to braid or brace, lace,

latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty ... from vanishing away?

O is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep, Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers,

still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey? — No there's none, there's none, O no there's none, Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair, Do what you may do, what, do what you may, And wisdom is early to despair: Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done To keep at bay Age and age's evils, hoar hair, Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding

sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay; So be beginning, be beginning to despair. O there's none: no no no there's none: Be beginning to despair, to despair, Despair, despair, despair, despair.

THE GOLDEN ECHO

Spare! There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!) Only not within seeing of the sun, Not within the singeing of the strong sun,

Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air, Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one, One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place, Where whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh

and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly

away with, done away with, undone. Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and

dangerously sweet Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face, The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah!

to fleet, Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an

everlastingness of, O it is an all youth! Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear,

gallantry and gaiety and grace, Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose

locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant,

girlgrace — Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them

with breath, And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs, deliver Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God,

beauty's self and beauty's giver. See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every

hair Is, hair of the head, numbered.

Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind

what while we slept, This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold What while we, while we slumbered. O then, weary then why should we tread? O why are we so

haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged,

so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered, When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care, Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer,

fonder A care kept. — Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where. — Yonder. - What high as that! We follow, now we follow. —

Yonder, yes yonder, yonder, Yonder.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Devil: And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine. The peasant I tempt today eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. What is his religion? An excuse for hating me. What is his law? An excuse for hanging you. What is his morality? Gentility! An excuse for consuming without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cock-fighting. I spent an evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness, and ministers answering questions. When I left I chalked up on the door the old nursery saying 'Ask no questions and you will be told no lies.' I bought a sixpenny family magazine, and found it full of pictures of young men shooting and stabbing one another. I saw a man die: he was a London bricklayer's labourer with seven children. He left seventeen pounds club money; and his wife spent it all on his funeral and went into the workhouse with the children next day. She would not have spent sevenpence on her children's schooling: the law had to force her to let them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she had. Their imagination glows, their energies rise up at the idea of death, these people: they love it; and the more horrible it is the more they enjoy it. Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian and an Englishman. The

Italian described it as a place of mud, frost, filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from heaven by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do not know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever succeeded in wading through. It is the same in everything. The highest form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these shewed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shews the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk. I could give you a thousand instances; but they all come to the same thing: the power that governs the earth is not the power of Life but of Death; and the inner need that has nerved Life to the effort of organizing itself into the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient engine of destruction. The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, the electric chair; of sword and gun and poison gas: above all, of justice, duty, patriotism, and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.

G.B. Shaw