Getting voices
Does everyone hear voices in their head? I do, and often they are voices that have long been silent in the troublesome present. Frequently it’s music, but I can also “switch on” speakers who have thrilled me at some time in my life.
The odd thing is, with performers, it’s quite commonly nothing like the words of theirs that you would expect to reverberate. Actors can surprise you with a line. With John Gielgud it is not Hamlet’s dying words that linger for me, but Richard II’s “Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords.”
Women’s voices are hard to separate from their femininity. Much has been written about Judi Dench’s ‘crack in the voice’, and I can certainly recall to full memory Peggy Ashcroft’s French accented Queen Margaret from the Shakespeare histories. With actress’s voices, it’s easiest to list the ones whose voices alone have fascinated me without my having actually seen the speakers. Such as June Tobin, Gladys Young or Marjorie Mars. And especially thinking of the Lady Macbeth of Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies — in fact, the recording from which I know that performance is a symphony of voices.
Singers, too. Sir Peter Pears, strictly speaking an incongruous interpreter of the Scottish folk song “Ca’ the Yowes”, brings tears to my sentimental eyes with his delivery of “Fair and lovely as thou art, thou hast stol’n my very heart”. I don’t need to play the song.
Bob Dylan in “Lenny Bruce Is Dead” sends a thrill down my spine with “he just had the insight [to rip off the lid before its time]” — improbable words, when baldly transcribed, to move this listener!
But I suppose I always get back to actors. Alec McCowen, an unmistakable voice, and a performer I saw in Moliere, Wilde and Shaw as well as in major Shakespeare parts. Yet the lines of his that I can run in my mind are from two lesser comedies in the canon, “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and “The Comedy of Errors”. With Ian Richardson’s Oberon in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, it’s “ … and the issue there create ever shall be fortunate.”
Robert Hardy, whom we all saw a great deal on television, stays in my head speaking out of context: “So well thy words become thee as thy wounds. They smack of honour both”. That’s from the recording of “Macbeth” which I talked about earlier. So now I’ve quoted the Unlucky Play. And we need luck at this moment. Never mind superstition, let’s all hang on to what for us are the good memories, and help to shape a good future. Sententious? Why not?
