A Lesson From Radio Classics

My darling has been out of town all week so I’ve been driving his car and enjoying his Sirius XM satellite reception tuned to a station that plays nothing but old radio shows from the 1940s.  What a kick!  Lots of shows that later went to television – like Dragnet , Have Gun, Will Travel, and The Life of Riley – but many others I’d never heard of before, like X Minus One, Suspense, and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, the “nation’s fabulous freelance insurance investigator!”  (Who knew?)

What dawned on me in listening to these shows was that so many plot lines and concepts that I thought were inventions of the 1960s, actually had roots in old radio, which drew in turn on literature.  You can hear echoes of television shows like Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond in Suspense, and Star Trek and Star Wars in X Minus One.  

Take the Hexabrod in X Minus One, a race of tall, thin, creatures incapable of emotion, only logic. These individuals sound a lot like Mr. Spock, who also sounds a little bit like the tall, thin, logical Sherlock Holmes. 

Anyway, what I was also listening to this week was how these radio players (many of whom were also film stars) deliver their lines, and how similar it is to the way British actors deliver their lines on Public Television programs.  

They hit the verbs.  

For example, in casual conversation I would deliver the following line like this: “WELL you see, he lived in the VILLAGE.”   But the British actress who actually said that line on television a few nights ago said this: “Well, you SEE, he LIVED in the village.”

I was so struck by how different that sounded, how much more powerful, that I started listening for where actors were putting the emphasis.  It’s what Alec Guinness advises in his first autobiography: when delivering a line, emphasize the verbs first, then the nouns, and the adverbs and adjectives will take care of themselves.  I’ve repeated that bit of advice in my head many times, but I didn’t really get it until this week when I was conscious of hearing it done.

Trying to find where to put the emphasis can be very hard, especially when you’re doing a cold read audition – no context, no direction, no nothing.  Harold Guskin in his book How to Stop Acting recommends an exercise where you take a deep breath, relax, and deliver the line.  Then take another deep breath, relax, and deliver the line a different way – and on and on until you find a way of saying the line that feels right to you. 

Well that has value to be sure, but it may not be clear to every actor which way is the right way.  That kind of advice would seem to appeal to an actor who approaches a character from the inside.   If you’re the kind that approaches a character from the outside you look for rules and strategies to get you started – like hit the verbs.

My "ah-hah!" moment.