"There is a mystery in every play that is written, no matter whether classical and poetic or modern and demotic, and it is the sound and the rhythm of the writing which take us there." Cicely Berry, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Voice Director, has been working alongside some of Britain's greatest actors and directors for over fifty years and is widely regarded as one of the most significant voice teachers in the world. From Word to Play draws on Cicely's extensive experience of working with theatre companies in Britain and throughout the world. It is her manifesto for a return to the words themselves: for moving away from an over-conceptualised, over-literal view of language and rediscovering the meaning in its sounds and rhythms. At the heart of this book is a concise, practical guide for directors in rehearsal, setting out work strategies that help bring out both the shape and the details within all kinds of text - whether verse or prose, seventeenth-century or contemporary. With a Foreword by Michael Boyd, Artistic Director of the RSC.

Cicely Berry, voice director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, is one of the most influential voice coaches of our time. In her astonishing new book, she looks closely at the interchange between sound and rhythm in language, showing how it can change the nuance of the meaning and take the director, actor, and audience further into the world of the play.

'Cicely Berry has based her work on the conviction that while all is present in nature our natural instincts have been crippled from birth by many processes - by the conditioning, in fact, of a warped society. So an actor needs precise exercise and clear understanding to liberate his hidden possibilities and to learn the hard task of being true to "the instinct of the moment"' - Peter Brook