Public speaking consistently ranks as one of life's most stressful events, up there with divorce, bereavement and home foreclosure. But there's a look of paralytic terror on the face of the protagonist of "The King's Speech" that goes beyond any working definition of stage fright. As the man who will one day become King George VI prepares to deliver a few ceremonial remarks, his doomed countenance suggests not so much a judgmental audience as a firing squad.
Colin Firth, who portrays "Bertie," the second-born, stammering son of Great Britain's King George V, captures the adrenaline-racing horror of a person obliged to speak when speech itself is an uncertain thing. As someone who has stuttered since childhood, I recognize his symptoms only too well — the blood-drained complexion, the collapsing gait, the passive acceptance of death in the eyes.
Since I have terrible stage fright without a stutter, I can't even imagine what it would be like to face a group of people focused on my words in fear that the words would not come out.
But "The King's Speech" is more than just a movie about stuttering. It dramatizes the difficulty of self-acceptance, the painful ownership of the life you have rather than the one you assumed you'd get. The film is also about finding one's voice, which I like to think of as a style of being that embraces the unique history you've been handed. Finally, it's about the possibility of incremental change, or, as a wise speech therapist once put it to me, "learning to stutter more easily," an approach that has had far more widespread application than I could have ever realized at the time.
Ah yes. The movie is profound in ways that had not yet surfaced in my conscious mind. What a splendid review of a splendid movie! Please read it all.
Thanks to Torey also for the link to the video of the actual speech by King George VI, which you may hear in the video below.
H.M. King George VI, broadcast speech to the British Empire from Buckingham Palace on September 3rd, 1939...at the outbreak of WW2.
