Jeannette Nelson stands beside me on stage at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank and tells me to breathe. Focus on different seats, she instructs, and attempt to draw air from the furthest reaches of the theatre. This is the first thing she asks an actor to do when she begins working with them – to “breathe the space” – and it is a surprising, eye-opening experience. For a non-actor it is suddenly apparent just how physical a job acting is; I could throw a cricket ball into the upper circle of the National’s Lyttelton Theatre, but to throw my voice across such a distance is another matter.
I could shout, I suppose, or try to copy the booming diction of theatre actors decades past, but Nelson does not teach people to be loud. When she talks about the “energy of the room” – among actors, even a stage as grand as the Lyttelton is “the room” – she isn’t discussing an abstract idea. Her medium is not the script or the theatre itself but the volume of air it contains. Like a sports coach she instructs actors to think carefully about their own bodies, to think of them like musical instruments.
Nelson has been teaching the art of using one’s voice for more than a quarter of a century. Having trained as a singer and dancer, she became a voice and dialect coach. She first joined the National, where she was head of voice for 16 years, in 1992, and has worked in theatres and on film and television productions around the world. Over the decades she has worked with many famous actors and noticed the effect they have on people, the way truly charismatic people hold the attention of those around them. In some cases, she admits, the mere fact of who they are can make a person the centre of attention, but generally fame and wealth are not the only constituents. (I’m inclined to agree; the richest man in the world has, in my experience, all the personality of a ham sandwich.) As Nelson explains in her book, Centre Stage, charisma is an art that can, at least to a certain extent, be learned.
“Bravery is the first thing,” she told me. Not bluster or self-confidence, but the courage to commit to how you communicate. She recalls a young actress – now, she said, very well-known, although she’s reluctant to use people’s names without their permission – who, in a rehearsal of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, committed herself so completely to acting out her character choking that those watching – including Nelson herself – were convinced it was the real thing. It is a question, she says, of “offering something up, not being told what to do, or hiding”.
In every airport in the world there is a shelf of books, aimed largely at insecure men, explaining how to be dominant in business meetings and win people over with confidence. Nelson also teaches non-actors in the art of public speaking, but her advice has nothing to do with exercising power. Instead, what she teaches might be described as presence: an ease and generosity of movement. It is perhaps more about thinking than speaking: “You’ve got to know who you are, to allow that authenticity out.”
In acting, giving a presentation or speech at a wedding, taking part in a job interview or even just a video meeting, Nelson says it helps to take a moment to think: “What am I trying to present? Am I trying to be like my boss? Am I trying to be like my mum said I should be? Those things get in the way, because they cause physical tensions. And we know when people aren’t authentic.”
We spoke as the US presidential race was gathering pace. Nelson said that while she is wary of charisma in politics, she admires the change in Kamala Harris’s speaking: “The difference between her now and three years ago – the confidence, the joy that’s coming out of her and the freedom with which she’s doing that, compared to her really very guarded answering of questions a few years ago.”
David Lammy is a good speaker – “open, energised” – and Tony Blair was “centred, confident in himself”, but Nelson failed to see Boris Johnson’s appeal: “I never understood what that was about. I never found him charismatic.” Of the populists, she says Nigel Farage’s divisive politics are reflected in his voice, his “didactic intonation, which is very off-putting for some of us… It doesn’t pull everybody in, but those who want to go that route enjoy it, I think.” Keir Starmer’s barristerial delivery seems to be the product of long professional experience; “I would love to help him free up a bit more, and release that brain out through his voice.”
The delivery must suit the content, of course. Trump’s speeches often wander into nonsense, but this is incidental to the performance: “He loves hyperbole, and seems to get caught up in it, and to really enjoy it.” This is a hard act for other politicians to copy – “they think it’s cheap, they think it’s dishonest, but he has none of that filter, and that in itself releases energy” – but it is a one-trick act. A good speech, Nelson advises, looks more like a poem – a list of ideas, each encapsulated in a few lines – and a good speaker knows the impact they want each idea to have.
In a rehearsal studio offstage, Nelson explains to me that there is an “armour, that we all put up in different ways” when speaking to one another. In my case, it is a pushing back of the shoulders. Similarly, most of us rock back on to our heels when talking, or lock our knees out straight. Nelson says these tiny, unconscious movements are how we “withdraw from the space”; we do not realise we are making them, but they speak volumes to an audience. Charisma is at least as much about listening and really paying attention to people, she explains, as it is about talking to them. Leaning back a little may seem polite, but it imposes a certain distance.
The way in which a person stands has a significant effect on their voice. The locked knees and straight back into which many public speakers stiffen – the ramrod posture of the infantryman – is terrible for the voice. “It tilts your bum, and that’s the bottom of your rib cage and your lungs,” Nelson explained. Her work revolves around the diaphragm, the layer of muscle at the base of the rib cage that we use to breathe (Centre Stage contains a few anatomy lessons, along with exercises), and which we restrict by pulling in our stomachs or pushing forward our hips. Speaking well on stage involves breathing and speaking from the stomach, not the chest.
Sometimes in meetings she’ll hear someone speaking and know that she could help them. “I have to really hold back,” she said. “People have to ask for that.” It is a personal, perhaps even slightly unnerving experience to spend time with someone who has spent her career searching out the meaning of other people’s movements, listening intently to their voices. Not everyone welcomes such focus. “My ability to read and change people is whether or not they want it or they feel it’s an intrusion.”
Early in her career, she recalled, an older male actor was indignant at the idea that a voice coach could improve the voice that was, to him, essential. Younger actors sometimes fear that dialect coaching could cause them to lose their authenticity. “The body and the voice are so personal,” she said, but her work is never about changing a person’s voice, only “opening it up”. If there is a secret to charisma, then for Jeannette Nelson it is this: “You’ve got to let your personality out, through your body.”
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