I like to draft while listening to the morning talk radio shows hosted by Leonard Lopate and Brian Lehrer on WNYC. The voices of these two men are preternaturally soothing, a perfect antidote to the focused graphic and mathematical thinking that goes into computer drawing. Whomever they’re talking with and whatever they’re talking about, it makes perfect Music For Drafting. There’s only one time when what I heard disrupted my work, and that was when Kenneth Branagh visited Lopate’s show this summer to promote a movie. He delivered all the predictable movie star platitudes, but as he started talking I stopped working. Branagh’s unadorned speaking voice is fine and soft; it carries England and Ireland in it, and sadness and music. It’s stunning.
In the PBS series Wallander, based on the crime novels of Henning Mankell, Branagh plays the titular homicide detective. True to the books, the series is shot on location in Sweden and many minor actors are Scandinavians. But Branagh and the other actors in major roles are British. The star adjusts his voice for the part. He doesn’t put on an accent but he holds something back, and in doing so he silences a large part of himself. Wallander is a laconic personality to begin with, so Branagh spends much of his screen time glowering silently and clenching his jaw. The Swedish locations give the stories an aptly gloomy tone. We see the stunted, spiritless streets, ports and parking lots of Ystad where the killers and killed pass their lives. The look of the perpetually overcast skies is remarkable – like aluminum. But what’s the point of these details if Branagh can’t use his voice fully? Why don’t they set the series in Belfast, or Manchester, and let him speak?