We celebrated the life of our Head of Voice Cicely Berry with an afternoon of poetry readings and unveiling a tree on Sunday.
Cicely's family and colleagues came together at The Other Place on Sunday to celebrate her life at the RSC, hosted by our Artistic Director Gregory Doran.
Cicely died in October last year. She joined the RSC in 1969 and over five decades she changed the way we thought about voice and text.
The event featured readings from some of Cicely's favourite poems and texts, percussion from Diogo Sales of Nos de Morro and the sharing of many personal memories about Cicely's impact on people’s work and lives. Her family then unveiled a plaque in Cicely's memory under a newly planted cherry tree.
Gregory said: "It was wonderful to celebrate the life and legacy of Cicely Berry, at The Other Place on Sunday. Particular highlights for me, amongst a host of others, included Lindsay Duncan’s delivery of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, which seemed exactly to express Cis’ politics and passion; Ron Cook remembering how Cis gave him the right to speak and find his own voice; and Juliet Stevenson making perfect sense of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. A glorious evocation of a wonderful woman."