Vocal coach Patsy Rodenburg: ‘The voice is about communicating – how you show yourself'
For more than 40 years, Patsy Rodenburg has been teaching performers how to use their voices. Now training both actors and executives, she tells Nick Smurthwaite about her latest book and the crossover between the theatrical and corporate worlds
Patsy Rodenburg found Shakespeare before she found her own ability to speak out. The doyenne of British voice coaches, who was head of voice at Guildhall School of Music and Drama for more than three decades, founded the National Theatre’s voice department and has worked with actors from Judi Dench to Nicole Kidman, claims that it was Shakespeare’s women who showed her that equality with men was achievable.
“What a relief it was to read the words he gave to women. They fearlessly witnessed the tyranny of men, outwitted them, eschewed their scorn and tested their legal authority. He dared us to look at our sameness and complexity,” she writes in her new book, The Woman’s Voice.
The book is part autobiography, part advice and part rallying cry to women to speak up for themselves. Having grown up in a family where the women’s voices were routinely suppressed – “tamed into meekness” as she puts it – Rodenburg’s lifelong mission has been to empower actors and executives of all genders to release their own voices, opinions and ideas.
‘I always knew my quest was communication’
She says: “I always knew my real quest was communication and presence, yet for me this vocation has shame attached to it, as I have always found speaking and being present difficult. I teach what I find difficult to do.”
Since the 1970s, Rodenburg has been teaching vocal skills to actors and others, and she led the voice department at London’s Guildhall School for 35 years. The author of six books on speaking skills, she now runs the Patsy Rodenburg Academy in Portugal, and conducts workshops all over the globe. Although she is passionate about actors and performance, Rodenburg believes the corporate world has much to offer the world of theatre, and vice versa. She actively tries to bring the two worlds together in her academy workshops.
“When I first started mixing them up 15 years ago, we all found the experience invigorating,” she explains. “Non-actors found the creative mess of actors liberating, while the actors learned about a different, more contained process from the corporate students. Vulnerability was heightened in both groups as the similarities outweighed any expected differences.”
She continues: “Actors have a lot to teach these people. They can talk openly about fear, which is an enormous relief for non-actors. The corporate people have often experienced a level of savagery the actors never knew existed. Both worlds understood the importance of teamwork and ensemble, and this mix heightened imagination and structured thinking.”
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For her next book, The Bard in the Boardroom, Rodenburg wants to write about how she has applied Shakespearean text and insight in her corporate work. She explains: “In my experience, lawyers, doctors and other leaders really bond with Shakespeare. These people come from all over the world and are not all English speaking.”
Early on in her career, she worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, under the legendary voice coach Cicely Berry. This gave her the opportunity to learn not only from ‘Cis’, as she calls her in the book, but also from some of the country’s finest classical actors. It was Berry who encouraged Rodenburg to go for the job of head of voice at Guildhall, even though she was only 26 at the time.
Later, in 1990, Richard Eyre invited Rodenburg to create a voice department at the NT, where she worked on an average of 45 shows a year. Among other things, she writes that she learned “that everyone is frightened most of the time. Frightened of failure in public. Frightened of success. Frightened of humiliation.”
She also learned that “you can’t be critical without a solution”.
“I have been asked to give notes that the director was too frightened to give,” she adds. Her mantra: “An actor cannot interpret or thrill an audience until their craft is organic. They might be clear but the audience cannot be transported to another world if they can observe an actor’s craft.”
‘I learned that everyone is frightened most of the time. Frightened of failure in public. Frightened of success. Frightened of humiliation’
In the course of her career, Rodenburg has taught and coached all over the world, often with indigenous peoples in South Africa and in Australia. “In many cases I learned more from them than they did from me,” she says. “People who aren’t as encased and buttoned up as we are often have a more natural way of speaking. My job is to bring someone’s knowledge about themselves into focus. We know more about ourselves than we think we do.”
Conversations with Rodenburg often come back to theatre, her first love, and what she has learned from leading theatremakers over the years.
One of her ambitions is to incorporate what she calls “a centre for elders” at her academy in the Algarve. One of her closest friends, the veteran director Mike Alfreds, who founded Shared Experience, is a frequent visitor. Another is the playwright Martin Sherman.
She says: “I believe we should honour and celebrate people with knowledge, such as Mike and Martin. They want to share their knowledge and experience. The voice is about communicating, engaging, how you show yourself, how you speak, how you listen.” Brigid Larmour, the outgoing artistic director of Watford Palace Theatre, was recently appointed associate artistic director of the academy, and will be running her own workshops there too.
Any thoughts of retiring, now she is approaching 70, are swiftly swept aside. “I intend to carry on passing on knowledge that has generously been given to me,” she says. “I can’t bear the idea of no longer being of use.”
The Woman’s Voice is published by Methuen Drama
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