Congratulations to Paul’s long-time client, Aaron Murphy, who just opened in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a production of Shotgun Players in Berkeley, California. Aaron and Paul had a great session finding Bernard Nightingale’s “idiolect,” or dialect specific to his character. In this case, it was the precise shade of Received Pronunciation (RP) needed. (For more on idiolects, see Paul’s latest podcast.)
Here’s what The San Francisco Chronicle had to say: “Aaron Murphy as latter-day Byron scholar Bernard Nightingale makes his character’s undisciplined ideas, his parade of aphorisms and allusions, his casual hauteur, his even more casual lust for every woman in his field of vision into a one-man fireworks display of gesticulations. Everything reels him, strikes him, hobbles him, springs him back to life with preposterously redoubled vigor. He gives his scene partners gifts, making an exchange meaningful and important not through what Bernard initiates, but by how he witnesses, absorbs and reflects what others put forth.”
Aaron’s opening follows on his recent success as Leontes in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at the Livermore Shakespeare Festival in northern California. Paul and Aaron’s work centered on the heightened language.
Aaron: “Paul’s coaching is so valuable it’s become an integral part of my show preparation. For Winter’s Tale, I met with Paul well before rehearsals started so that I was going in with text clarity, so that the directors had me at my best from day one.”
Thanks, Aaron, and best of luck with your current run of Arcadia, which continues through January 6.
