AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
King tongue play online12/31/2022 ![]() “If the stammer had been inauthentic, we would have had no film,” Firth told me on a recent visit to New York to publicize the film. He drew on these experiences to build a rich, believable portrait of Bertie’s speech impediment and Logue’s unconventional approach to helping him overcome it. They don’t, as far as I’m concerned, cure the stutter.” Seidler knows whereof he speaks, because he himself grew up with a stutter. “These mechanical techniques,” Seidler explained to me in a recent interview, “are incredibly useful once you’ve overcome your stutter internally. The historian Denis Judd, in his 1982 biography of George VI, reported that Logue’s vocal exercises included the sentences “Let’s go gathering healthy heather with the gay brigade of grand dragoons” and “She sifted seven thick-stalked thistles through a strong thick sieve.” As it happens, variants of the “thistle sifter” tongue twister date back to 1831, when American journals reported that this “unutterably curious sentence is frequently used in schools for the correction of stammering.” When David Seidler began working on the screenplay for “The King’s Speech,” the tongue twisters were one of the few publicly known details about the real-life Logue’s techniques in working with Bertie. ![]() After the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, in 1936 opens the throne to Bertie, the therapy has geopolitical consequences, permitting the new king to address the nation in live radio broadcasts on the brink of World War II. ![]() Logue prescribes a regimen of vocal calisthenics, tongue twisters among them, to improve the mechanics of Bertie’s speech. ![]() But “Bertie,” as Firth’s character is known to his family, has much graver concerns: he is crippled by a stammer that makes public speaking a devilish chore. Similarly, the voice coach in “Singin’ in the Rain” tries to steer the silent-film star Lina Lamont away from a grating New York accent inappropriate for the talkies. Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady” (and its predecessor, “Pygmalion”) trains the flower girl Eliza Doolittle to lose her Cockney diphthongs. “My Fair Lady” had “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.” “Singin’ in the Rain” had “Moses supposes his toeses are roses.” To cinema’s pantheon of tricky diction, we can now add, “I have a sieve full of sifted thistles and a sieve full of unsifted thistles, because I am a thistle sifter.” Audiences for “The King’s Speech” can hear Colin Firth as Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), practice this tongue twister as part of the speech therapy conducted by Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |