Nevertheless it’s obvious that the demands on an actor’s voice and speech are changing fast. At the Actors Centre I’ve been developing with members workshops aimed at exploring a couple of these changes.

The media in which actors are called on to play are varying. Some theatre spaces are getting smaller, and in a small space the danger is that you become inaudible through relaxing too much and losing the precise focus of the space. Radio, film and television demand voice truthful to the inner life, and this can reduce the size of the voice, which then becomes a problem when you go back into theatre. Conversely finding the size for stage can result in losing truth.

The move away from RP in many productions of the classics presents new opportunities – but also scope for a different kind of insecurity. I have come across actors deterred from auditioning for the classics because of feelings about their accent or ethnicity, and some with a sense that finding the rhythms and structures of, say, an Elizabethan or Jacobean play is somehow inseparable from finding RP. Yet playing classics in RP is a conventionality that only dates back about 150 years, and their rhythms and cadences can interact fascinatingly with a wide diversity of accents, when they’re allowed to.

This then is the background to my work with actors as individuals.

But work on productions is also something I do.

"I have to say that our lesson was one of the most inspiring classes I’ve ever attended"