Finding the Voice

  Vocal Warm-ups  There is a story of when Sir John Gielgud was working with Peter Brook on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in 1952. Peter Brook was into doing lots of warm ups and improvisations sometimes all day sometimes. After 3 hours of vocal warm up and then improvisations where actors had to show emotions and induce and create an emotional reaction in the audience of Brook and his assistant. Brook would tell the actors what emotion they had to show. One actress was given fear and came out on stage and raised her voice and arms and showed great emotion as she improvised a speech about when she found her mother dead in her apartment two years previously. Brook was impressed. It was then Gielgud’s turn. He went up on the stage. He was given despair. He turned his back on the audience. Gielgud then turned around emotionless and forthright and said, “We open in one week and we haven’t even picked up the bloody script.”He then walked off the stage and sat down again.    Actors and st