Jeannette Nelson stands next to me on the stage of the National Theatre on London’s South Bank and tells me to breathe. Focus on different seats, she says, and try to get air from the farthest corners of the theatre. It’s the first thing she asks of an actor when she starts working with them – “to breathe the room” – and it’s a surprising, eye-opening experience. A non-actor suddenly realises how physical acting is; I could throw a cricket ball into the upper tier of the National’s Lyttelton Theatre, but throwing my voice over such a distance is another matter entirely.
I could probably shout or try to imitate the booming diction of theater actors of decades past, but Nelson doesn’t teach people to be loud. When she speaks of the “energy of the room” – among actors, even a stage as large as the Lyttelton is “the room” – she is not discussing an abstract idea. Her medium is not the script or the theater itself, but the volume of air contained within it. Like a sports coach, she instructs actors to think carefully about their own bodies, to view them as a musical instrument.
Nelson has been teaching the art of using your voice for more than a quarter of a century. After training as a singer and dancer, she became a voice and dialect coach. In 1992 she joined the National, where she was voice director for 16 years, and has worked in theaters and on film and television productions around the world. Over the decades she has worked with many famous actors and has noticed the effect they have on people, the way truly charismatic people capture the attention of those around them. In some cases, she admits, the mere fact of who they are can make a person the center of attention, but generally fame and fortune are not the only factors. (I tend to agree; the richest man in the world, in my experience, has the personality of a ham sandwich.) As Nelson explains in her book: In focusCharisma is an art that can be learned, at least to a certain extent.
“Courage is the most important thing,” she told me. Not cockiness or self-confidence, but the courage to commit to the way you communicate. She remembers a young actress – who, she said, is very well known today, although she is afraid to mention people’s names without their permission – who, at a rehearsal of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwandevoted so much time to her character’s choking that viewers – including Nelson herself – were convinced it was real. It’s about, she says, “offering something, not being told what to do or hiding.”
In every airport in the world there is a shelf full of books aimed primarily at insecure men, explaining how to appear dominant in business meetings and win people over with confidence. Nelson also teaches amateur actors the art of public speaking, but her advice has nothing to do with the exercise of power. What she teaches could be described as presence: a lightness and generosity of movement. It is perhaps more about thinking than speaking: “You have to know who you are to bring out that authenticity.”
When acting, giving presentations or speaking at weddings, interviewing, or even just video conferencing, Nelson says it helps to take a moment and think: “What am I trying to present? Am I trying to be like my boss? Am I trying to be like my mom said I should be? These things get in the way because they cause physical tension. And we notice when people are not being authentic.”
We spoke as the US presidential election campaign was gathering momentum. Nelson said that while she was wary of charisma in politics, she admired the change in Kamala Harris’ speeches: “The difference between her now and three years ago – the confidence, the joy that emanates from her and the freedom with which she does it, compared to her really very reserved answers to questions a few years ago.”
David Lammy is a good speaker – “open, full of energy” – and Tony Blair was “centred and confident”, but Nelson failed to see Boris Johnson’s appeal: “I never understood what it was about. I never found him charismatic.” As for the populists, she says Nigel Farage’s divisive politics are reflected in his voice, his “lecturing intonation, which is very off-putting to some of us… It doesn’t attract everyone, but I think those who want to go down that road enjoy it.” Keir Starmer’s lawyerly diction seems the product of years of professional experience; “I would like to help him to free himself a bit more and free his brain through his voice.”
Of course, the delivery has to match the content. Trump’s speeches often drift into the nonsensical, but that’s beside the point: “He loves exaggeration, seems to get caught up in it and really enjoy it.” It’s hard for other politicians to replicate – “they think it’s cheap, they think it’s dishonest, but he doesn’t have that filter, and that alone releases energy” – but it’s a one-hit wonder. A good speech, Nelson advises, looks more like a poem – a list of ideas, each summarized in a few lines – and a good speaker knows what effect each idea is meant to have.
In a rehearsal room backstage, Nelson explains to me that there is an “armor we all put on in different ways” when we speak to one another. In my case, it’s a hunching of the shoulders. Similarly, most of us rock back on our heels or straighten our knees when we speak. Nelson says these tiny, unconscious movements are our way of “retreating from the room”; we don’t realize we’re doing them, but they say a lot to the audience. Charisma is at least as much about listening to people and really paying attention to them, she explains, as it is talking to them. Leaning back a little may seem polite, but it creates a certain distance.
The way a person stands has a significant impact on their voice. The locked knees and straight back that many public speakers brace themselves into – the ramrod-straight posture of the infantryman – is terrible for the voice. “It tilts your butt, and that’s the lower part of your ribcage and lungs,” Nelson explained. Her work revolves around the diaphragm, the layer of muscle at the base of the ribcage that we use to breathe (In focus includes some anatomy lessons and exercises) and we limit these by pulling in the stomach or pushing the hips forward. To speak well on stage, we need to breathe and speak from the stomach, not the chest.
Sometimes she hears someone speaking in meetings and knows she could help them. “I really have to hold back,” she says. “People have to ask for it.” It’s a personal, perhaps even slightly unsettling experience to spend time with someone who has spent his career exploring the meaning of other people’s movements and listening carefully to them. Not everyone welcomes such a focus. “My ability to understand and change people depends on whether they want it or whether they find it a disturbance.”
Early in her career, she recalls, an older male actor was outraged at the idea that a voice coach could improve the voice that was so essential to him. Younger actors sometimes fear that dialect training will make them lose their authenticity. “The body and the voice are so personal,” she said, but her work is never about changing a person’s voice, just “opening it up.” If there is a secret to charisma, Jeannette Nelson believes it is this: “You have to express your personality through your body.”
