Patsy Rodenburg

What does the voice tell you about someone?

I suppose where they're blocked.

When you hear somebody with a speech impediment, what goes through your head? Are you immediately linking it to something deeper in their personality?

I'm a pragmatist. I'm very practical. What I do is I look at the body. I look at the breath system particularly, and I start to try and diagnose where that blockage is. It mostly is in the breath. But you have to graft at it. I'm a great I'm a bit of a plodder. I'm a bit of a donkey. You have to work something out. But if somebody has a an appalling voice or speech habit, that builds up until it becomes very critical. And the interesting thing is, a lot of actors go into acting because they have those problems.

When you are teaching politicians, do you have to have a degree of sympathy with what they want to say?

Yes and, by the way, you can't teach anybody unless you care about them. That doesn't mean to say that you're stroky strokey. No teacher should want to be liked. It's like parenting. If you're going to make somebody move to a place that is difficult, you do it with hopefully a lot of compassion and love, but also you have to do this. So you have to take them on.