Microphones in modern drama theatre

Bliudov Daniil Vladimirovich ORCID: 0009-0009-0229-0623 Postgraduate Student, Scenic Speech Department, Russian State Institute of Performing Qrts 191028, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Mokhovaya str., 34 bludov213@mail.ru Other publications by this author

If in the 1930s and 40s screen speech, for all its specifics, clearly inherited stage speech, and in the 1950s and 60s there was a complex process of mutual influence and renewal of speech style in cinema and theater, today we can state the most powerful impact of screen speech culture on theatrical speech. One of the most striking manifestations of the "kinification" (and "telefication") of modern stage speech is undoubtedly the almost ubiquitous use of microphones in the theater. If in 1975 the author of the book "Fundamentals of Sound Engineering in the theater" Yuri Kozyurenko wrote with slight regret that "there are still many theaters in whose repertoire there is not a single performance where a microphone would be used" ^{[1, p. 113]}, today the situation is the opposite. And it is unlikely that we will find a theater in which microphone technology is not used at all (unless it is a chamber platform). It seems to us that several factors have led to this: both technical and aesthetic.

The technical factors include, first of all, the fact that a large number of theaters today exist in rooms that are acoustically poorly adapted to sound without additional amplification. Microphone technology in this case allows you to compensate for the disadvantages of acoustics. "Nowadays, theaters, especially young ones, and especially entreprise troupes often hold performances in concert halls, in multi-purpose halls (such as clubs and houses of culture) or in halls whose construction was not intended to be used for theatrical purposes. In such cases, sound amplification becomes inevitable" ^{[2, p. 25]}.

It is also important to note that music plays an increasingly important role in modern performances. Sometimes almost all the action is immersed in a permanent musical background. And in this case, of course, the microphone support of the actor's speech is simply necessary. So, in the play "The Governor" by Andrei the Mighty, music is almost continuously played in the BDT, and all the artists, without exception, speak into buttonhole radio microphones. Performances by Rimas Tuminas "Uncle Vanya", "Eugene Onegin" (Theater named after Vakhtangov) are also permeated with music – and the voices of the artists are supported by microphone "suspensions" and directional microphones on the ramp. There are also performances that are generally built according to the canons of musical action, such as Viktor Ryzhakov's "Optimistic Tragedy" at the Alexandrinsky Theater (in this performance, both musical numbers and dramatic episodes sound exclusively with microphone amplification). The voices of the artists in the dramatic oratorio, which Andrei Moguchy turned into the "Thunderstorm" by A. N. Ostrovsky, are also supported by microphone amplification.

Finally, the viewer's perception has changed significantly. The level of comfortable loudness has increased ^[3] and the auditory sensitivity threshold in general, the viewer has become accustomed to "amplified sound" ^{[2, p. 22]}. This happens both because of the so-called noise pollution, and because of the use of miniature headphones that bring the sound source extremely close to the auditory analyzer. "We all come to the theater from gadgets, from televisions, from headphones, which we can adjust: make it louder, quieter. There is no way to do it in the theater" ^[4]. The viewer gets used to the speech standard established in screen arts and mass media. And this is an acoustically large, dynamically compressed, dense speech. Dense sound from a lavalier microphone is the sound of speech "by default", to which today's viewer is used and ready for. As a result, the viewer, coming to the theater, often does not hear well what the actors are saying. Microphone amplification "adjusts" stage speech to the standards of screen speech, sound engineering sees its task as providing "a comfortable sound of a theatrical performance" ^{[2, p.29]}. In a personal conversation with the author, V. N. Galendeev recalled how during the London tour of the play "Three Sisters" of the Maly Drama Theater in 2019, the producers of the Vaudeville Theater (Vaudeville Theatre) could not believe for a long time that St. Petersburg artists work without microphones: after all, London theaters have long subordinated their sound to the "screen standard".

But, in addition to the technical need to "support" stage speech with microphone amplification, there are also aesthetic, artistic reasons for using microphones in a drama theater. Obviously, the perfection of modern sound technology opens up huge opportunities for directing. At the disposal of the sound engineer today there are numerous and diverse microphones, miniature and massive, wired and wireless. In combination with modern sound reinforcement systems, you can achieve almost any acoustic effect in the hall.

The technique of internal monologue, borrowed from cinema, is actively used by modern theater. Let's turn to Valery Fokin's play "The Birth of Stalin" at the Alexandrinsky Theater. By the way, in this production, the artists work without microphones (there are only two performances on the big stage of the theater that do not use microphone amplification), this is part of the general artistic solution, stylization for theatrical action of the late 1940s. In one of the episodes where the revolutionaries celebrate the successful completion of the operation, suddenly the artists begin to exist silently and a little slower, and the viewer hears through the loudspeakers a long pre–recorded internal monologue of the protagonist: "They think power is honey. No, power is the impossibility of loving anyone, that's what power is...." (this fragment of the monologue is taken by the authors of the play from the novel "Sandro of Chegem" by Fazil Iskander). Young Stalin (Vladimir Koshevoy), while his thoughts are sounding, then looks somewhere into the distance, then steps aside and stands with his back for a while, then smokes, then quickly walks back and forth along the proscenium. The use of a recorded internal monologue helps to convey the transformation taking place with the hero, the beginning of his transformation into a monster, his ability to withdraw and coolly analyze the situation from the outside.

Sometimes the use of a microphone replaces "aparts" and appeals to the audience, allowing the hero to address his thoughts directly, so to speak, "into space". In Thomas Ostermeier's play "Richard III", a retro microphone hangs from a long thick wire descending from the grate during the entire action in the center of the stage. And Richard III voices all his monologues and innermost thoughts into it.

The author's commentary also became an important part of the performance (for example, in the play "The Governor" of the Bolshoi Drama Theater. Tovstonogova artist Vasily Reutov in a transparent control room at the studio microphone almost continuously reads the text "from the author" – and reads quite fluently and distantly, almost like a police report). Sometimes the director himself picks up the microphone – as it was at the touring screenings of the play "Heroes' Square" by the Warsaw New Theater directed by Krystian Lupa. During the performance on the stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater, the director was in the royal box and quietly translated what was happening on stage from Polish into Russian into a hand microphone, then gave instructions to the artists, then just purred something. The whole performance thus turned into one big visual and sound monologue of the director-author.

The reception of sound shock, a kind of manifestation of the "theater of cruelty", is also impossible without special sound reinforcement. Such, for example, is the episode of the workers' revolt in A. Mighty's play "The Governor", where screams and groans, metal blows and grinding sound at an ultra-high volume level, and a Worker performed by artist R. Barabanov "spits out" words into a vocal microphone with extreme expression and amplitude. If the whole performance with its unhurried free editing and permanent background music gives the impression of a hassle, a dream, then the episode of the riot is undoubtedly a nightmare. And semantic, and aesthetic, and purely physical. The same physiological effect was achieved by Nikolai Roshchin in the play "An Old Woman Hatches" on the New Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater, in which Elena Nemzer, who played the title role, made truly inhuman sounds with an inhuman timbre (wheezes, screams, screams, etc. joined the voice), repeatedly amplified and creating an image of a not crazy old woman due to the microphone sound, but rather a powerful demonic figure.

In general, almost all the performances that are played on the high-tech New stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater speak with "microphone voices". This is undoubtedly part of the aesthetics, part of the artistic program. Microphone sound is a natural component of the theater, which exists at the junction of art and technology, actively using sound design and projection (and in general, some analytical detachment from the events unfolding on stage has not been alien to V. V. Fokin's creative individuality in recent years). In the science fiction play "Today. 2016" by Valery Fokin, the main character performed by Pyotr Semak is in an illuminated transparent parallelepiped in the middle of the dark space of the stage area throughout the entire action. At the beginning of the performance, the viewer hears a rich palette of technological noises (crackling, hum and creak) and sees images projected on the wall: there is a projection of the brain, and something like an encephalogram ... P. Semak's voice sounds through a headset microphone. Individual words are echoed, distorted, transformed in real time. The other characters that arise later also speak with microphone amplification. Microphone sound together with a transforming stage platform, continuously sounding "floating" noise and music accompaniment, abundant use of video projection - all this adds up to a general aesthetic in which acting works are just one of the tools in the director's palette: along with light, sound, projection, movement of scenery, etc.

In a similar coordinate system, there was a documentary performance by Mikhail Patlasov "Noise" (2014) on the New Stage. Here, the whole action unfolded in a huge multimedia cube, the edges of which could be almost transparent, or could become a field for projection. The play is based on the real story of a teenage gamer who shot his classmate with a sawn–off shotgun. If in the play "Today. 2016" microphones helped to create an unreal and fantastic picture, then in "Noise" the artistic effect is achieved due to the collision of computer virtuality (scenery, soundtrack, general neutral gray color scheme of costumes) and the documentary existence of artists working in the technique of speech observation of real prototypes, participants of the tragedy that occurred. The apotheosis of the documentary in the play is the monologue of actress Victoria Vorobyova, who generally breaks the theatrical convention and speaks from the stage on her own behalf, as if refusing the role: "I am an actress, an actress of this theater. I was supposed to play the mother of the killer, the mother of the main character. But while working on the play, I heard a telephone conversation and realized that she could not be in this play." The actress talks emotionally about the format of documentary theater as such, about the opportunity to speak from the stage using real stories of real people (the text of the monologue changes from performance to performance). In the performance "Noise", the voices of all the artists, without exception, are voiced by microphones-headsets, while they are not subjected to special processing. Microphones in this case are used as an important element of "computerization" of what is happening. In fact, the play attempts to reproduce the perception of the world by the main character – a teenage killer who has lost the line between reality and virtuality. Hence the endless sound background, the space of the "hypercube", the complete absence of scenery (the change of space is carried out by changing the projection). The conflict is set immediately, at the most general level: the real bodies of the artists are enclosed in a virtual environment, and the real documentary speech sounds indirectly through a microphone.

Such a rapid flourishing of microphone sound is associated, among other things, with a turn in theatrical aesthetics and the expansion of what is commonly called "post-drama theater". In such a type of theater, not only the play can be "deconstructed", but also the artist, his "bodily and vocal unity" ^{[5, p. 245]}. The microphone sound allows the director to separate, "alienate" ^{[6, p. 75]} the voice from the artist and create any acoustic effects. In the modern post-drama theater, the actor is to some extent deprived of subjectivity. His microphone voice does not belong entirely to him. Ultimately, it depends on the sound engineer what exactly the viewer will hear, and whether he will hear at all: "The voice sounds from an uncertain source and cannot be attributed with absolute accuracy to either a specific artist or a specific character" ^{[7, p. 158]}. In this respect, the modern post-drama theater in many ways approaches cinema, in which a new reality is formed from a combination of a flat image, a recorded voice (not necessarily belonging to the artist we see on the screen), editing and other isolated components.

In Ariane Mnouchkine's program performance "Sentries on the Dam" (Thtre du Soleil, 2003), each character was created with the participation of three artists at once: one artist played the role of a wordless puppet in a mask; the second – the role of a puppeteer in black directing a puppet; the third – in real time voiced the character's replicas into the microphone. "When watching the performance, an absolutely magical feeling of the presence of a character — an image that is created collectively was created" ^{[8, p. 276]}. However, Ariana Mnushkina's performance, although it demonstrates multidimensionality, conscious stratification, variability of character creation in the space of post–drama theater, but obviously inherits not so much cinema as puppet theater, the whole essence and nature of which is to create a holistic image from the movements of the puppeteer, the theatrical doll and the voice.

In a peculiar way, the Commissar, as performed by Anna Blinova from V. Ryzhakov's play "Optimistic Tragedy", seems to be "split" into several characters. This splitting, abrupt switching occurs primarily at the level of speech specificity. In the play, A. Blinova uses at least 4 speech masks: the shrill falsetto of a Komsomol girl, a nasal, intermittent utterance in Lisa Khokhlakova's monologue, a direct aggressive cry in the "Monologue of Marilyn Monroe" and the soft natural voice of actress Anna Blinova. Microphone amplification undoubtedly helps the actress to solve the most difficult technical and acting task.

An even more radical deconstruction, a kind of "separation" of the voice from the artist, is found in the performances of Robert Wilson, in which every movement, every sound, every light change is verified to the millimeter and to the second. Scenography, music, light, actor's existence are deconstructed, decomposed into atoms, from which the stage image is then reassembled. And if in Wilson's opera performances, the artists still sing without microphones and their voice completely belongs to them, then in the director's dramatic performances, the "microphone voice" is the same component of an artistic image as the movement of a light beam, the color of a suit, a musical chord sounding or the speed of turning the head. Voice, plastic, makeup, costume, rhythm – all these components are combined not by the body of a particular artist, but by the overall artistic solution of the episode. In Wilson's play "Hamlet Machine" (1986), almost all speech is amplified by microphones ^{[7, p. 165]}. During the rehearsals of this performance, it became clearly clear that "the actors' voices are just one of the elements of the sound picture that the director creates. Other acoustic components are also carefully checked during rehearsal, and not in the recording studio, but on stage. The time that was allocated for rehearsals with the artists is spent on this. The director treats light and sound as full-fledged participants in the rehearsal process, whose contribution is not inferior to the contribution of artists" ^{[7, p. 166]}. In Wilson's play "Golden Windows" (1979), in addition to microphone amplification of the artists' voices, pre-recorded speech phonograms were used, which was unusual for both the artists and the audience: "At one of the rehearsals, the actress, who was standing with her back to her partner, David Varrilow, asked: he had just said a line into the microphone, or she had heard a phonogram recording his voice. Varrilow joked, “I'm not quite sure myself.” And this is a problem not only for the actors, but also for the public. [...] The effect of a postmodern "displacement" of the character is created" ^{[7, pp. 157-158]}. In the already mentioned play "The Governor" by A. Mighty, such an effect of "displacement" is used, when in the middle of the action two androgynous angels (played, without any doubt, by male artists) suddenly begin to speak in female voices.

Susanne Kennedy went even further along the path of such deconstruction, using speech phonograms in her performances. For example, in the play "Women in Trouble" (2017), the action takes place in a continuously rotating scenery, in a sterile closed world resembling a computer game. Artists appear in several rooms, whose faces are covered with special masks that create the effect of either robots or computer simulation heroes. The stingy mechanical movements of the artists also make you remember the characters from virtual reality. Specifically processed, "electrified" voices of artists sound through loudspeakers. At first it seems that the speech of the artists is simply subjected to microphone amplification and processing: the characters talk to each other, we see their articulation, somewhat mechanized due to specific masks. But at some point, "multiplied copies" of the characters begin to appear in different rooms of the scenery: due to the same complexion of the artists, identical costumes and masks, a complete impression of "cloning" is created. In one of the rooms, a scene unfolds between a girl and a young man, and in the next room, which gradually opens to the viewer with the turn of the circle, the same characters (performed by other artists) are already in a different stage situation. But the speech of the heroes at the same time continues to sound continuously, the voices do not change. And at this moment we understand that the whole action unfolds under a pre-recorded speech soundtrack, and the artists only synchronously fall into articulation (I must say, they do it masterfully). S. Kennedy used a similar existence under the soundtrack in her other performances, such as "Purgatory in Ingolstadt" (2013), "Three Sisters" (2020) ^[9]. This technique of "dubbing on the contrary" brings to mind not only the concert singing performance "under plus", but also the practice of filming under the soundtrack, which was used and continues to be used to create films-musicals. At the same time, all musical numbers are recorded in the studio in advance, during the shooting they are turned on through loudspeakers, and the artists only get into their own articulation.

However, microphone speech in the theater can occur in completely different dimensions. If in performances of a post-dramatic nature, a microphone helps to "separate" the voice from the artist, then in performances of a different aesthetic direction, microphone sound can create the effect of cinematic, natural, direct existence and sound of artists, "remove" a touch of theatricality from stage speech. The critic E. Sokolinsky writes about K. Bogomolov's play "Glory" at the BDT. Tovstonogova (in it all the actors sound through microphone headsets): "[...] the innovator-director decided to show how a pretentious performance in verse can be turned into a modern (?) psychological drama. Technically, for this it was necessary to hang microphones on the performers' ears - God forbid, they will raise their voice. In the play, frankly declamatory, they talk in the manner of "whispering realism". To emphasize the psychological accuracy of the drawing, natural facial expressions, the actors' faces are shown in close-up on the screen walls" ^{[10, p. 75]}. The cinematic actor's existence is being transferred to the stage, and microphones and video projection help to remove the problem of finding and sounding the artist in the real space of the stage. However, as we see it, a modern artist who combines work in the theater with filming in movies and TV movies inevitably brings to the theater the "train" of his on-screen "perfect" existence and sound. "They mumble because they compete with cinema and television. They mumble, because many people are used to just a microphone here. Because the director wants the text to be, and at the same time, no matter how it is, so that the speech does not "pearl" in such a bold stage font" ^[4], says V. N. Galendeev. "Other tolerances have appeared. Now there are a lot of microphones. And suddenly there was an opinion that a person speaking on stage with an operatic sound that easily flies into the hall, that he is a little unnatural. And the person who talks "under the mute" is natural" ^[11], Professor Elena Igorevna Chernaya believes. There is an acute aesthetic problem that requires an art critique: and what is considered naturalness on stage and on the screen?

The naturalness of stage speech is a complex parameter, not measured instrumentally and, moreover, changing over time. What seemed natural in the theater in the 1930s, during the thaw, began to feel like a loud declamation. But the much more restrained theatrical speech of the 1950s and 60s also sounds somewhat archaic today (after all, the style of today's stage speech is largely determined by the speech of life). Ideas about naturalness are continuously updated. These views are influenced by everything from the height of ceilings to the speed of cars, from the evening news to the economic situation. 

The naturalness of stage speech can be understood as the desire to get closer to the sound of life. And K. S. Stanislavsky began with the fact that he sought from the artists a literal naturalness of speech, not conditioned by either the space of the stage or the presence of the auditorium. But the real conditions of the stage platform inevitably make adjustments to the actor's speech: the natural sound will differ on the big stage and on the chamber stage, on the street performance-promenade and in the immersive performance in the former factory shop. The very physical presence of an artist in a particular space, voluntarily or involuntarily, refracts, "modifies" his speech.

And for each performance, it is necessary to search for its own speech organics, its "naturalness". Each play, each author requires both the search for his own way of existence and the search for his own speech style. Not to mention working with a poetic text, where an attempt at everyday, "prosaic" sound, as a rule, turns into a failure. In addition, the creative handwriting and style of a particular director also directly determine the sound of speech in his performances. Thus, the naturalness of stage speech is always conditional, this concept is a continuously updated unspoken agreement on what is considered natural. This is a compromise, a balance between the "hum" of the current era, the real acoustic conditions of the venue and the nature of existence found in the performance.

Of course, a "filmed", as if raw, "vital" sound, can arise in the theater if it is part of the director's plan. In Timofey Kulyabin's play "The Hole", staged in Zurich based on Ibsen's play "Doll's House", the action is transferred to our time and unfolds in such a giant aquarium – behind thick glass. The director's decision is that the entire external, physical life of the characters is just a background. A genuine collision happens in the virtual space – in social networks and messengers. Above the stage "aquarium", the screens of one, then another, then several smartphones belonging to the heroes are continuously projected onto the wall (all correspondence, by the way, is really conducted by the artists in real time). The play surprisingly withstands such a radical directorial move, but that's not what we're talking about right now. Perhaps this performance can be cited as an example of the extreme "blurring" of speech. The artists are behind thick glass, only the sound from the hanging microphones reaches the viewer. The characters' speech is extremely "muted", often almost illegible. The strength of the sound is determined only by the real distance between the artists. Due to such "blurred" speech, written dialogues unfolding in messengers come to the fore. And such deliberate illegibility, randomness, non-necessity of speech is achieved (we are convinced of this) by artists consciously. This naturalness is completely conditional. This is a filigree game of everyday life, a game of conversation in passing.

It is worth mentioning about the documentary theater, which takes real monologues as a basis. In cases where the authors of the performance not only reproduce the texts of monologues, but also the speech manner of the characters, the highest skill of speech observation is required from the artist. Let's recall the performance "Antibodies" by Mikhail Patlasov (Baltic House Theater-Festival), dedicated to the murder of St. Petersburg anti-fascist Timur Kocharava. Actresses Olga Belinskaya and Alla Emintseva (the first played the mother of the murderer, the second played the mother of the murdered man) so accurately reproduced the intonation–melodic structure and speech manner of their prototype heroines (the so-called "information donors" ^{[12, p. 73]}) that when audio fragments of authentic interviews were launched in the finale of the performance, the first few for a few seconds it was a complete impression that actresses continue to say this. Thus, in the documentary theater, the feeling of authenticity, naturalness of speech is also conditional, it is achieved through play, through highly professional speech observation.

What happens to screen speech? On the set of a modern television series, the artist is faced with the requirement to be extremely relaxed, as if "not to play anything". And this is a powerful provocation, often entailing a life–like existence, sluggish household plastics and speech. The shooting conditions also have this in mind: the lavalier microphone is so tiny and weightless that you almost immediately forget about it; the cameras are silent; the lighting devices are compact. Involuntarily arising for the artist, the illusion of the vitality of what is happening may seem like a boon (after all, the magical "if" is minimized here – exist for yourself organically, as in life, and that's the end of it). But does this authenticity of the shooting conditions kill the authenticity of the output material? Isn't there a steady sense of imitation from these seemingly "natural", as if "organic" on-screen dialogues?

We are convinced that regardless of the style of a particular movie or TV series, the effect of naturalness, the ultimate organicity of acting speech can be achieved only by artistic means. They can be different. In the films of A. Y. Herman, the feeling of living, as if "overheard" speech is achieved thanks to the author's peculiar techniques: distortions of acoustic perspective (the speech of the characters in the foreground often sounds quieter than the voices of people passing in the background), understatement of replicas and strange syntax, over-convex speech characterization. In Herman's films, the speech soundtrack of the film was almost always created during the tinting period, synchronous sound from the shooting rarely went to work. A special feeling of naturalness of speech, a live stream of speech textures was created in the studio, at the microphone.

There are also opposite examples, when the impression of live speech, caught by surprise, is created due to synchronous shooting (when the final soundtrack of the film mostly includes replicas recorded on the set). In the multi-part TV movie "School", the effect of authenticity of what is happening is achieved through the tone correctly found by the entire cast: young actors playing ninth graders do not lose the feeling of the presence of a hand-held camera traveling freely between them for a second; they improvise a lot, while remembering to what point the episode should come. Their speech skillfully mimics the natural one, but at the same time they do not work "from themselves", but through a speech mask.

That is, we can only talk about the relative naturalness of screen speech, about naturalness within the framework of a particular work of art. Absolute naturalness is probably achievable only in documentary films, and even then not always. And any meeting of a film artist with a role is always a search for a special tone, sound, speech organics. The appeals of filmmakers: "Just don't play anything!" express a quantitative rather than a qualitative assessment. The director who says this wants a different nature of feelings, and not an attempt to completely abandon the role. In such attempts, alas, so frequent on today's screen, there is some fundamental untruth.

The evolution of screen speech during the XX-XXI centuries can be interpreted as a path from "theatricality" to "naturalness". But there is a certain simplification in this understanding. The aesthetics of the sound of on-screen speech today is determined by a number of completely conventional standards: for example, a mandatory acoustic close-up (regardless of how far away from the camera the speaker is). This standard originated in the early sound cinema (and was due to the imperfection of sound recording equipment), then it was supported by the requirements of technical control on television (they were dictated by the limited capabilities of the speakers of household televisions), and today it has finally been established due to the fact that laptops and smartphones have become one of the main channels of media consumption. For the same reason, screen speech is increasingly undergoing dynamic processing (compression). Over the past decades, the abundance of films and television films, fully voiced in the studio, as well as dubbed films, has formed another standard of perception - the standard of studio, "sterile", purified sound of actor's speech. Today, a film with a clean recording (that is, one where the speech of the artists is recorded right on the set) sounds strange, "dirty", unaesthetic to the domestic audience. Thus, it is difficult to say that "theatricality" has been replaced by "naturalness" of sound. Rather, a certain new convention of the sound of on-screen speech has arisen, which is now perceived by the viewer as a given.

In 2014, the author of this study had a chance to visit the United States and, among other things, see Darren Aronofsky's film "Noah" on the big screen. Viewing the picture turned out to be unexpectedly difficult, and that's why. Almost all the actor's speech in the film was recorded right on the set, so when listening through the most powerful cinema speakers, the ear constantly noticed all the smallest sound artifacts inherent in the final phonogram: the rustling of clothes on the lapel microphone, specific amplitude-frequency response, changes in timbre when turning the head, etc. In short, a complete feeling of watching the working version of the film was created or a report from the filming location. This "dirty", documentary sound of the actor's speech would not be so strange if some modern chamber story were unfolding on the screen. But when in the frame, the ark, the masses of animals and birds – in a word, a myth - and at the same time the speech of the artists sounds like a phenomenon absolutely from our world, a powerful aesthetic dissonance arises. At the same time, American colleagues who watched the film did not experience such a feeling. The ear, brought up in the domestic culture of sterile, cleaned sound of on-screen speech, could not be rebuilt and organically perceive Aronofsky's film. And on such a particular example, it is clear that we are not always aware of the conditional laws by which the actor's speech exists in the sound space of the film.

Thus, it is possible to speak rather not about the naturalness of the sound of speech, to which screen arts went in the 20th and 21st centuries, but only about the gradual disappearance of technical limitations for the artist. At the dawn of sound cinema, a special speech technique was required to record sound with imperfect microphones, a special "pitch", a special speech style that included aligned dynamics, vocalized vowels, and flight sound. With the advent of first magnetic, and then digital sound recording, the film artist received much greater freedom in speech nuance. And today, technology and technology allow you to record on the set or in the studio any sigh, any unarticulated sound, the quietest whisper. There is an illusion that the artist is completely freed from the technical need to modify his speech in the frame. Hence arises that non-necessity in existence and that sluggish, supposedly "organic" screen speech, which, by the way, is then carried by the artists to the theater. As E. V. Dvizova correctly notes, "spontaneous word, [...] articulatory neutrality has spread on the dramatic stage, which is accompanied by dictional inarticulacy, intonation illegibility, the "sliding" of thought on the surface. [...] This is due, among other things, to the artists' transportation of the everyday manner of speech from the sets of television films to the space of the dramatic stage" ^{[13, p. 3]}. Acting theater director A. S. Kuzin writes about a similar problem, arguing that the screen "is a kind of impetus for the appearance of sluggish, optional Russian pronunciation, unjustified haste, lack of intonation" ^{[14, p. 346]}. V. N. Galendeev speaks about artists who, after filming, "return, reconfigured to another mode of operation, purely professional. They continue to work “in front of the camera" for some time. And "with a microphone"" ^[15].

It can be concluded that the need for modification, "recharging" of actor's speech in screen arts has not disappeared anywhere, only now it is dictated by artistic, not technical requirements. And in order to create a "natural" image on the screen that gives the viewer a sense of documentality, a conscious work of the artist is required, the search for an appropriate way of existence and a special speech style.

            Thus, the influence of screen speech on stage speech in the modern drama theater goes in several directions at once.

The first direction is aesthetic, it is connected with the phenomenon of post–dramatic theater, which treats the actor and, in particular, his voice only as part of the general "visual-acoustic complex" ^{[16, p. 96]}. This is manifested both in musicalization-the rhythmization of dramatic action and speech, and in the "separation" of the voice from the artist by means of microphone technology (sometimes reaching radical forms, such as the existence of actors under a pre-recorded speech phonogram). Just as in the art of cinematography, in post-dramatic theater, a general sound image is assembled from disparate elements (image, editing, sound, light, music, the artist's body, voice, etc.). The aesthetics of post-drama theater creates a huge number of opportunities and expressive means for directing, being at the junction of theater, screen arts and scientific technologies. But you can also observe a kind of dictate in a post-drama type theater, a significant limitation: the live voice of an artist without microphone amplification is poorly included in such aesthetics: so, for example, in the already mentioned "Optimistic Tragedy" by V. Ryzhakov, individual scenes (for example, the monologue of an elderly "witness of history" performed by A. Volgin), in fact, what is happening should sound acoustically, without microphone support. But the general aesthetics of the "electrified" performance-concert captures these chamber episodes, "adjusting" them to the general solution (as we see it, to the detriment of the meaning). Both the Era of Ziganshin and Arkady Volgin represent in this performance not just another generation, but also another theater (including in terms of the content of the stage word). And it's even a pity that the mighty director's law has absorbed them with its microphone aesthetics. However, to some extent, the expansion of cinematic sound aesthetics made the drama theater feel its true acoustic nature anew. The artistic program of the Maly Drama Theater – the Theater of Europe demonstrates exactly this approach: the installation on the acting ensemble, on natural sound, on minimizing the use of microphones.

The second direction is aesthetic and psychological, related to the category of naturalness in stage and screen speech. Established, in particular, in modern television cinema, the everyday, "passing", quasi-natural speech style has a significant impact on the stage word. On the one hand, theatrical directing sometimes begins to demand from the artist just such a "filmed" speech. On the other hand, theater artists acting in films inevitably extrapolate the screen way of existence and the screen way of speaking to their theatrical works.

The third direction is connected with the psychophysiology of spectator perception, with the established matrix with which viewers come to the drama theater. Accustomed to the dense, acoustically large, compressed sound of speech in the screen arts, viewers involuntarily transfer this model of auditory perception to a theatrical performance. The "alignment" of actor's speech, which was characteristic of early sound cinema, returned at a new stage of the technical development of screen arts and was embodied, first of all, in acoustic close-up and dynamic processing. Screen arts have formed a sound stereotype in the listener. That is why modern theater is often required to sound at a much higher acoustic level than 40-50 years ago, to have a more powerful effect on the auditory perception of the viewer. This leads to extensive and not very selective use of microphone amplification of stage speech. Screen speech through the viewer presents updated requirements for theatrical speech.

In general, the influence of screen speech on stage speech is overwhelming, largely depressing the nature of the theatrical word.

It is quite difficult to talk about the reverse process - the influence of stage speech on screen speech. Aesthetically, cinema in the speech aspect has long dissociated itself from the theatrical tradition and exists independently. Perhaps the only real feedback channel between theater and cinema remains the theater school, which is the same for theater and cinema artists. Despite the inevitable modifications that the actor's speech undergoes when moving from the stage to the set, the mechanisms of speech generation brought up in the theater school continue to be relevant. At the same time, it is obvious that today the task of stage speech teachers is to educate students not only the skill of sounding in stage conditions, but also the ability to be effective, intelligible, legible, targeted when working in the frame and at the microphone. That is, to bring up speech plasticity in future artists. Hence, there is a need for greater variability in speech training: education of flexible diverse breathing, the ability to voice different spaces in volume, to ensure intelligibility with different sound dynamics, to achieve speech differentiation without active external articulation, to maintain speech tone not only in movement, but also in statics. The theater school should probably pay special attention to working at the microphone (for example, to introduce special courses following the example of the VGIK and the Institute of Them. Shchepkina). The need to train a universal synthetic artist capable of working in dramatic and musical theater, on stage, in cinema, on television, in the dubbing and dubbing industry raises the question of a significant expansion of the program of the subject "Stage speech".