Cicely Berry Text Work: Her Voice Exercises for Actors, and How to Use Them on a Speech

You know the speech. Every word is in place, the breath is planned, and the meaning is clear in your head. Then the director says something like “I’m not hearing the words,” and you have no idea what to change, because you were saying all of them.

That note sits at the heart of Cicely Berry’s work. For five decades she worked on voice and text at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she kept noticing the same gap in performances: the listener got the sound of the actor’s voice, but not the words. Her answer went beyond technique: a set of odd, physical, sometimes rough exercises that knock you out of the way you planned to say a line, so the words have to happen fresh.

The short version: Berry believed actors drown the words in their own sound and in “good sense” picked up from reading the page. Her exercises give the body something else to do while you speak (walk, push, tidy, whisper, reach), so you stop presenting the text and start thinking through it. You run them as rehearsal passes, not as performance, and you keep only what they show you. Below are the exercises she described in her own words, and a worked pass on a Shakespeare speech you can try tonight.

Who Cicely Berry was, and what she was listening for

Trevor Nunn brought Berry into the RSC in 1969, and the next year made her head of voice. Gregory Doran’s tribute to her notes that this made the RSC the first company with a permanent, full-time voice department. She died in 2018, aged 92. Her books are the place to go deeper: Voice and the Actor, then The Actor and the Text, then Text in Action, which her publisher describes as drawn from her group work, with exercises tied to specific scenes.

The people who worked with her remember a method you did on your feet. In the RSC’s collected tributes, Nunn calls her work “frequently physical and improvisational, and always entertaining.” Juliet Stevenson remembers voice and text sessions every morning at 9, before rehearsals started at 10. Patsy Rodenburg credits her with bringing voice work out of an isolated studio and into the rehearsal room, alongside the director.

What was she listening for? In The Actor and the Text she describes making a mental note during performances: “sound v. words.” The actor is pouring meaning into the tone of voice, and the listener gets the tone but not the argument. Her fix, in one line: “it is the meaning that must always dictate the sound.” She also thought reading a part first on the page makes us cautious, eager to make “good sense,” when words are often “rougher and more anarchic than we allow them to be.”

Why the exercises keep your body busy

Many of the exercises below follow one pattern. You speak the text while doing something that has nothing to do with “acting it”: walking a route, pushing against people, sorting objects, speaking very quietly to someone far away. Michael Boyd, in the same tributes, put the point well. He called her physical exercises “wake up calls to thought.”

The busy body takes the planning mind off duty. You can’t lay out your careful inflections while you’re fighting through a crowd, so the line comes out as a thought you need to speak, not a reading you’ve prepared. That matches what she told the director Scott Ellis in a 2010 American Theatre interview: “Language actually comes from the need to speak a thought.”

She also refused to turn any of this into a system. She told Ellis she didn’t want to label her work: “I just like to explore as I go.” So treat the exercises below as tools, not steps. Pick the one that answers the note you got.

Berry’s exercises, in her own words

These are the exercises Berry described herself, in the Ellis interview and in The Actor and the Text, with a note on what each one is for. Most were built for a company, so each one also has a way to do it on your own.

Walk, and change direction at every punctuation mark

In the interview, Berry describes a group speaking a speech together while walking, changing direction on every punctuation mark, so they find each thought as it goes. The University of Texas Drama-Based Pedagogy site runs a three-round version credited to Berry and the RSC’s Rachel Gartside, called Punctuation to Punctuation: read around a circle, swapping readers at each mark; read again and stop to untangle any confusing phrase; then stand and walk the text, turning at each mark. Our guide to performing Shakespeare monologues has the solo version, and a second walk that turns only at full stops.

Do a task while you speak

For actors working with the director John Barton, Berry would throw a pile of books on the floor and have the actor put the books in order on the shelf while speaking the text. She told Ellis she wanted each actor to honor the director’s style while finding their own personal relationship with the language. One way to read it: with your hands busy, you can’t arrange the line in advance. At home, any small sorting job works: stacking a shelf, pairing socks, putting cards in order.

Fight your way through resistance

Berry’s example in the interview is Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, getting surrounded by a group that “tries to impede him from speaking his piece,” so he has to fight his way through. The words come out with the force of someone who has to be heard. On your own, ask a friend to hold your shoulders and lean their weight against you while you push forward, or press your palms into a wall. Keep it safe and steady; the point is effort in the body, not a wrestling match.

Talk to someone who keeps turning away

For Ophelia’s speech in Act 3, Scene 1, Berry had the rest of the group walk briskly around the space while the actor tried to make someone listen, and they turned away whenever she came near. It shows the actor what it is to have no one to talk to. Alone, you can get some of this by speaking to a friend who keeps walking out of the room, so you have to chase them with the line.

Very quiet, but reach across a big space

For an actor working with Trevor Nunn, she would get them to “do things very quietly but reach across a large space.” Volume can’t do the work, so the shape of the words has to. Stand at one end of a long room, or a hallway, and speak the speech just above a whisper to a point on the far wall.

Whisper it once you know it

In The Actor and the Text she suggests that when you know a part well, you whisper a section of it through. You notice freshly what the words are doing, she writes: their movement, weight, and length. Whispering strips out the sound you’ve grown fond of, which is exactly the habit she was trying to break.

Lean back and feel your own weight

In one-to-one voice work, Berry had the actor sit on the floor in front of her chair and lean back against her hands, so they feel their own weight. That was for breath and where the voice begins, not for text. If a partner can take your weight this way, try it before the text passes; if not, our guide to Fitzmaurice voicework covers breath work from another teacher who trained with Berry.

One more thing to listen for. The Actor and the Text gives a whole section to vowels and consonants, and Berry describes the actor who leads with logic: he will “press out the consonants and reduce the vowels” to the same short length. If your speech sounds clipped and emphatic, let the vowels have their full length on your next pass.

A worked example: Leontes’ “Is whispering nothing?”

Berry used Leontes for the resistance exercise, so take one of his speeches. In The Winter’s Tale, Act 1, Scene 2, Leontes has convinced himself that his wife Hermione is having an affair with his friend Polixenes. His counselor Camillo has just told him he’s wrong. This is the answer.

Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh?—a note infallible
Of breaking honesty?—horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? Noon, midnight? and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.

William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act 1, Scene 2, from the public-domain Project Gutenberg text. You can read the whole play on our Winter’s Tale page.

Before you move, look at the shape. In this edition the speech has 13 lines, 13 question marks, two dashes, ten commas, and a single full stop, at the very end. The first nine lines are a pile of questions, most of them a new piece of evidence. The last four are one long sentence held together by commas. Across the speech, the word “nothing” comes eight times, plus one “nothings.”

Pass 1: walk the marks

Walk the speech and turn at every mark. In the first nine lines you’ll be turning every few words, sometimes four times in a line. It feels frantic, because it is: a man who can’t stop collecting proof. Then, at “Why, then the world,” the questions stop; every turn is now a comma, and there’s no full stop to rest on until “If this be nothing.” Notice where you speed up and where you want to stop and can’t. That’s the character’s mind, not your nerves.

Pass 2: push through

Now give yourself resistance, the way Berry did with Leontes. A friend holds you back, or you lean into a wall, and you have to get every question past them. You may find the questions stop sounding like questions and turn into accusations aimed at Camillo, which is what they are. Listen to the run of “nothing” lines, too: under pressure, does each “nothing” grow bigger than the last, or do they all sound the same?

Pass 3: whisper it

Then whisper the whole thing, which is fitting for a speech that starts with whispering. Listen to the hissing sounds that run through the opening lines: whispering, kissing, sigh, skulking, wishing, swift. A whisper makes them hard to miss. Notice, too, which words you want to lean on when you have no voice to push with. Mark them; they’re often your operative words.

Pass 4: back to the scene

Last, stand still and say it to Camillo, at full voice, with nothing in the way. Don’t try to reproduce the walking or the pushing. Just see what stayed: maybe the questions now drive forward, or “My wife is nothing” lands harder than it did this morning. Keep those, and let the rest go.

This is where it helps to hear the speech inside its scene. Upload the scene to Offbook, pick Leontes, and realistic voices read Camillo’s lines, then wait for yours. Offbook listens through your microphone and plays Camillo’s next line when you finish, so you can see whether what you found in the exercises holds up against the real cue.

Building Berry work into your week

These passes take time, so spread them out. Juliet Stevenson remembers Berry’s sessions running every morning before rehearsal. Copy that shape: do a pass before you rehearse, and take what you find into the room. A simple plan for a speech you already know:

1. Day 1: Read the speech aloud once, then count its punctuation and mark where each thought ends.
2. Day 2: Walk the marks twice, once turning at every mark and once only at full stops.
3. Day 3: Run it against resistance, then with a task in your hands.
4. Day 4: Whisper it through, then speak it very quietly to the far end of a long room.
5. Day 5: Run it still and plain in the scene, with your cues, and write down what changed.

If the words aren’t fully learned yet, start there; whispering and the quiet reach both work best on a speech you already know. Offbook’s memorization cues can replace your lines with first letters while everyone else’s stay visible, which helps you get the words down before the physical passes.

Keep the discovery, drop the exercise

The commonest way to waste Berry work is to perform it. If you bring the frantic walking energy into the run, you’ve swapped one plan for another. The exercise is a question you ask the text. The answer is what you keep, and the answer is usually small: one word with more weight, a thought that finally drives into the next one, a breath in a new place.

The other mistake is treating it as a warm-up you do and forget. Berry’s whole point was that the physical life of the words and their meaning are the same thing. In the Ellis interview she quotes her own book From Word to Play: whatever the playwright, “meaning is rhythm, and rhythm is meaning.” When a note says you’re not hearing the words, go back to the passes and find the rhythm you were smoothing over.

Questions actors ask

Which Cicely Berry book should I read first?

Start with The Actor and the Text if your problem is speaking a part, especially Shakespeare. Her publisher describes it as building on the exercises in her first book, Voice and the Actor, which is the place for breath and voice basics. Text in Action is aimed at actors and directors working as a group.

Can I do Berry exercises alone?

Mostly, yes. Walking the punctuation, whispering, the quiet reach, and a task in your hands all work solo. The resistance and turning-away exercises need at least one partner, though a wall gives you some of the push.

Do her exercises work on modern plays?

Yes. Her publisher notes that Text in Action focuses on Shakespeare but uses techniques that can be applied to modern texts too, and The Actor and the Text has a chapter on relating the work to other texts, including modern ones. Walking the punctuation can be revealing on a modern speech that runs on with no full stops.

What was Cicely Berry’s work focused on?

The text. She trained actors’ voices too, but her aim was to get the actor out of the way of the words, often through group and physical exercises in the rehearsal room rather than a separate voice studio.