Something I wonder about Richard Armitage and audiobooks

Richard Armitage reading Hamlet: Prince of Denmark. Photo supplied by A.J. Hartley.

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I assume that once Richard Armitage knows he’s doing a script, he reads through it a first time (silently) for first impressions, and then a few more times to mark it up. I assume he thinks about voices to use and that he makes sure there’s an indication of when he has to switch them, and so on. Perhaps he has nicknames for particular voices (at least once during Hamlet I thought I heard his Ian McKellen imitation!) or descriptions for them. I assume he may practice certain accents (and since the Hobbit, his Scottish accent has gotten, from my perspective, more convincing than it was in CBeebies, although I don’t know why that should be — exposure to Graham McTavish?). And I wonder how and why he picks them — he almost never does the London “matey / cockney” thing, does he?

What I wonder more, though, thinking about his approach to the dialogues and then his pull back from character voices into narrative, is about the long, narrative sections of the work. Is this like being in an orchestra, where you rehearse something and pencil in reminders of what you are supposed to be doing, where you are supposed to be going, where the crescendos and decrescendos go? Where you want to display a little rubato? Where you want to keep a particularly regular tempo? I can’t imagine that with 9 hours of work, and an hourly rate of even something like $425 (forget where I read that number as an estimate for an audiobook read by a particularly well known artist), that you have the opportunity to read over something more than once or twice in preparation. You need to know what you are doing, and do it immediately.

So what I am wondering about: how do you prepare? how do you mark up your script? is this something you’re just naturally good at? do you have to practice? and so on, and so forth …

~ by Servetus on May 23, 2014.