Voicing for Ikea, WWF and The Tea Light Hunt!

It's always rewarding to be offered work that deals with a subject I find particularly important, and sustainability and recycling is something I am passionate about. So I was delighted to provide the voice today for a film concerning tea lights! In Norway everyone uses tea lights by the sackload –over 200 million every year. Ok, so it's dark for half the year, but even so, they are everywhere. And most people just throw away the empty aluminium cups –until a campaign instigated by Ikea and WWF got school classes involved in imaginative collecting, registering and recycling of these, with prizes for the school classes that collected the most empty cups or came up with the most creative ideas for recycling –it was called The tea light hunt", and has been a great success in Norway, building environmental awareness and increasing recycling. Highly commendable. I strongly support any projects that promote these goals, and urge everyone to really consider whether whatever they throw out can be re-used, recycled or revamped. The film is an international version, so hopefully it will be seen around the world –and yes, that's with my voice!

Currently recording

I am currently recording as an audiobook a pretty fascinating book about technology and its relationship with and effect on culture. It's the kind of book I would be attracted to anyway, so it's doubly gratifying to be working on, even though the style (very long sentences) is more challenging than I first thought.

Titanic Work in Halifax

I am currently visiting Halifax, Nova Scotia, as part of a five-week tour of Canada and the USA, and doing a spot of research for my Titanic project whilst here. Halifax has a close connection with the story of Titanic as it was here that boats set out from to recover bodies of those lost and where many of them are buried. The sea and shipping are a huge part of what makes this place what it is, and I have spent much of the day in the excellent Museum of the Atlantic, which houses some amazing Titanic artifacts recovered from the sea, including a deckchair and part of the grand staircase. All the other artifacts I have seen before have been recovered from the wreck, whereas what is displayed here seems quite new, having only been in the sea for a matter of days. A cabinet for instance. There are also touching items connected with the recovery of the bodies, like a canvas bag with a number on it, to contain personal possessions found on each body. It is clearly a popular place to visit, and I am thrilled that all the children who are visiting while I am there are as intrigued and captivated by the Titanic story as I am. Tomorrow I shall be visiting the graveyard where about 130 of those who perrished are burried. It promises to be a moving experience.

Current Recording

I am currently recording as an audiobook a great book called "Emerging Churches". It's one of the most "flowing" audiobooks I have ever done, and full of personal accounts and stories that are wonderful to breathe audio life into. It's also a very enganging subject and has frequently got me thinking deeply about spiritual issues of my own. And for once I feel really quite satsified with the result!

Returning to One's Roots

First of all apologies for not having posted so much recently. A resolution for 2012 is to be more frequent with my posting. I will also be starting a new PHOTOGRAPHY blog to display (show off!) some of the pictures I take, as I become more and more fascinated with the art of photography. On that note I must add a further apology as to the quality of the photograph accompanying this blog post. As I am in the photograph I obviously haven't taken it myself, and the unfocused, shakiness of the picture is the responsibility of someone in my family who shall remain unnamed! However, I wanted to post the picture because it marks for me a return to the place where I stepped onto a stage for the very first time when I was 9. Before this it was also the place where I went to the theatre for the first time, and where my love of performance, theatre, show-business and all that started. I had the chance to revisit this place –The Memorial Hall in Dereham, Norfolk– earlier this month, and to inspect the results of an exciting £3-million refurbishment. I was thrilled and delighted to discover that despite the revamp, the hall had the same atmosphere that I remember from my childhood, and the stage retained its magical allure. I was so excited to step on the stage again for the first time in 31 years –even in its bare, working-light lit state- and feel that same rush of energy and magic that drew me into acting in the first place. I would have loved to have performed something there again, but we were only on the briefest of visits. For me any stage is a temple of possibilities and magic, but revisiting this one was truly special. So perhaps I am the one shaking here, rather than the photographer!

Finding the elephant within me

When one gets a telephone call asking whether one is interested in recording a children's song for a successful interactive educational website one immediately says yes, and jumps at the opportunity to share with the world a bit of music. Of course one says yes –it is the default answer of any actor being offered a job. "We'd like you to sing the elephant's part..." I see..., wondering what one has done to be worthy of such typecasting. After all, I I have never played an elephant before –in any medium. I have voiced numerous other creatures over the years though, including dragons, snakes, birds, mice and bats -and the very first professional role I played in the theatre was a dog. But an elephant -that's something new and dare I say daunting. What sort of a voice does an elephant have? There's not much research material about. Dumbo is not right for the huge and clumsy pachyderm that I am to play, and John Hurt in "The Elephant Man" is the wrong road to go down completely. Method acting is called for -at least some kind of method! I look at pictures of elephants –their eyes always seem so sad somehow, I wonder why. I make some tentative elephant sounds and startle people around me –probably not a good idea to do this on the street. Somehow end up with a Yorkshire-sounding singing voice –a bit dour, a bit slow, but full of gruff modulation. In the recording studio however, after a couple of run-throughs, it becomes clear that more vocal energy is needed. "Find the elephant within you" says the producer. I dig deep, become heavy (but elephants are graceful too) use my imagination and .... find that elephant! Somehow in this delightful process of discovery the voice of the elephant moves south, and the final result is an elephant that sounds like a cross between Londoner Ian Drury and my granny from Kent! After 20 or so takes the song is in the can, and I can step out of the elephant shoes, comfortable though they now have become, and return to the real world. I cannot help feelling grateful. A performer after me has to sing the part of fish –a tiny, little blue goldfish, but he had prepared the voice of a sea bass!

Current work

Following a rather quiet period –the worrying demon of life as a freelancer– I now find myself with more than enough to do. Like buses, jobs seem to either all turn up together, or not at all. My current assignments are recording an audiobook on the media in Italy, doing voicework for a children's audiobook and now returning to the Norwegian opera to do some more coaching for Peter Grimes –which is being presented next month with quite a few changes of cast. It is especially nice to be back at the opera, and always good to go back and work on something for a second time –one brings so much more insight and knowledge to the piece. And as there are so many wonderful singers there who know Italian backwards I am craftily hoping I can get them to help me with some of the Italian pronunciation I I have to deal with in the audiobook!

Writing about "Titanic".. now and then

I have spent some time this summer working on Project Titanic, my play about ...Titanic. I have done most of the research I need to do, especially in the texts of the American and British hearings that were held shortly after the disaster. Part of the challenge has been to try to isolate exactly what story or stories I want to tell, because there are so many individual stories contained within the Titanic saga -from conception right through to today. The most intriguing thing I have found is that everyone who becomes involved in Titanic becomes part of its history. Titanic the ship may have sunk, but Titanic the legend -the idea, lives on. And it is this that makes Titanic truly unsinkable. Somehow this particular ship and its story caught people's imagination and continues to do so. Why? Well, that is really the question I pose in my play. It is the phenomonan of Titanic that I am concerned with rather than the historical, facts and events. These have been addressed admirably in so many other works, and I have read a great many of them. Ideally I think the only way one could do full justice to every story contained within the history of Titanic would be to have a monologue by each and every person who has in some or any way been connected with the ship. But this would run to thousands of people. One must make a choice. My play has one key figure (J. Bruce Ismay) who survived the disaster (or did he?) and a small number of characters who didn't, and whose lives have particularly intrigued me. People often ask where my interest in Titanic comes from. A very good question. I think it probably started when I saw "A Night to Remember" at a very early age and was transfixed. (I saw it again a couple of weeks ago and was still transfixed.)
It must have been just after seeing that film that I wrote the account of Titanic posted above. I was thrilled to discover it a few days ago in an old school book. I am intrigued by the inaccuracies, but the narrative and terse presentation of key facts is not bad for a 7-year old!

Peter Grimes - Work completed

Tonight is the dress rehearsal of Peter Grimes at the Norwegian National Opera –and my last day of work there for the time being. When it opens on Saturday, I shall be there as a member of the audience, and will be looking forward to seeing the opera –up until now I have primarily been listening to it, or "seeing with my ears" as I like to call it –and primarily the text. Having had the opportunity to work as language coach for the soloists has been a hugely rewarding experience, and I have felt extremely priveleged every time I have stepped into the magical world of this great opera house. I have learned as much as I have taught, both about opera, theatre, Britten, the human voice and the English language. There have been many challenges and some turbulence along the way, but I have heaps and heaps of respect for the people I have been lucky enough to work with and alongside. Opera is a demanding enterprise; a huge collaboration of musical, technical and artistic talents, all working towards the goal of making it as good as it possibly can be. I have played a very small part in this –text in opera will always be subservient to the music, but I would like to think my contribution has helped achieve that goal. Each performer has had different journeys to make in terms of their English –some have hardly needed any work whereas others have had to endure countless adjustments and notes from me -poor things. All have come up good. I am particularly happy to have been able to apply some of the princlples of diction and articulation I learned at drama school –my notes from that time have come in very handy. And the general conclusion we have all come to is that English is a very tricky language to sing!
Peter Grimes will be playing in the autumn too, with quite a few new performers, so somehow I feel I will return...

The website for Peter Grimes at the Norwegian National Opera: Peter Grimes

Current Recordings

Most of my time at present seems to be spent in a recording studio –not at all as glamerous as it might sound- recording two very different books. One is a history of the Comintern, full of worryingly difficult names and very long sentences, and the other is a gripping and rather mysterious novel by Ian McEwan called The Child of Time. Recording two so different books in tandem presents certain unique challenges, because the vocal quality required is very different in each case. For the history book the voice has to have a certain distance and certainly objectivity, whereas for the novel one has to –at times– live emotionally into the words –not so much playing the different characters, but suggesting them, sketching them like an artist on a canvas. The listener must be allowed to do the colouring in, for otherwise he or she has only a passive role in the storytelling, and I think that is fundamentally wrong. At other times one has more of a narrator function. So changing from one type of voice to another in the course of a recording session (which for me is usually about four hours) always takes a bit of time. But as I earlier this week have voiced amongst other things: a dragon, a bear, a moose, a lion, a little boy and a chameleon on another project, I think I can handle the transition from novel to non-fiction satisfactorily...

This Week’s Flashback -20th anniversary of my first play

Today, March 21st, it's twenty years since I first had a play produced and perfomed –two, in fact, as it was a double-bill consisting of two one-act plays I wrote for The Oslo Players under the umbrella title "Another Place". The two plays were "The Royal Box" –a light comedy about the panic created in a theatre when it is announced that they are to have a royal visit; and "Snail Street" -a tragi-comedy about people living in cardboard boxes on the street. I directed and appeared in the former. God only know show I found the energy and time for all this, because I was also studying full-time and working part-time too. It was a truly gargantuan adventure, and one of the most tiring times of my life, but utterly rewarding. It was also the first production of The Oslo Players –the English-speaking drama group at the university of Oslo, and the start of that whole adventure I later used the process of this production as part of my thesis in theatre studies. Of the two plays my greatest affection is for "The Royal Box", and on re-reading it today, I must say it holds up remarkably well, and is certainly very tightly written, and it is more like a full-length play than a one-acter. I am very fond of it.
Here's part of the prologue to the pair of plays..spoken by a cleaner in front of the stage:

THE CLEANER:
More dust! Don't you ever wonder where the hell it
all comes from? I do. ...Sometimes I wonder whether
there's not a huge cloud of dust, way up there; and
every room in every building in the entire world gets
like a ...a daily dose of dust. A daily dose of dust from
this gigantic cloud! I mean it's all the same isn't it...
dust I mean. The dust of a palace is just as ...dusty as
that of a prison or a church or your sleazy downtown
joint. Kings and housewives fight against it; painters
and surgeons hate it, and bakers and cooks fear it.
Yet it keeps me in a job (pause). Strange though, isn't
it, to think that when we, God forbid, die, we eventually
become dust ourselves. Sure it takes time, but sooner
or later you'll find yourself floating to the floor in a
thousand specks in places like this! That's why I stick
to my job -I come across so many interesting people!

Opera update

Sadly I have not been very good at updating this blog over the last couple of months, and you would be forgiven for thinking that this is due to not having done anything worth mentioning. However, the opposite is closer to the truth –I have had too much to do to find the time to write here. I shall from now on though try to post an update once a week, even it is only a few lines.
I am glad to say that the work I put into "The Rape of Lucretia" was well received and the opera itself a great success. I was very happy when I attended the last performance in Oslo and heard that all the coaching I had done with the soloists had worked so well, and I was very proud of them. The whole experience of working with the opera has been enormously educative and enlightening, and made my present work on the next opera much easier. "Peter Grimes" is a vast enterprise compared to the chamber intimacy of "Lucretia" –majestic, daunting and tremendous. My focus is primarily on the libretto by Montagu Slater, but I cannot help but be affected and moved by the magnificent music of Benjamin Britten –even when played in bits and pieces on a piano in a rehearsal room –it is constantly surprising, playful, alarming, rich and atmospheric –and above all exciting. I have had the great pleasure of giving some language instruction to the 50 or so strong opera chorus, and found that rather challenging, but mostly I am working with the soloists individually, ironing out any vocal anomalies when it comes to vowels or providing alternatives. Once you get down to very close analysis of the sounds of a language you discover all sorts of issues about how a particular word should sound in a particular context -and in many cases there is no one correct answer. The singers I am working with are however all so professional and quick at following suggestions that I feel confident everything will sound excellent when the opera opens –still a couple of months away!