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dulwichdiverter · 4 years

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In good voice

WORDS BY ALEXANDRA BOYD

Barbara Houseman has lived in East Dulwich for 26 years. She’s a voice and acting coach and theatre director and has been teaching from her Victorian terraced house since the 1990s. She’s also recently built a sleek, calm studio in her verdant back garden to teach meditation and mindfulness.

“In 1993 I was living in a flat in Leyton and wanted to buy a house,” Barbara tells me in her beautiful garden that’s bursting with greenery. “I wanted to buy something there but all the places I saw either had rooms painted bright purple or dreadful 1960s stone-clad mini-bars.

“My good friends Chris Elwell and Jackie Eley, who run the Half Moon Theatre in Limehouse, had lived in East Dulwich for years and suggested I check it out. The prices were comparable to Leyton at that time so I viewed four houses but nearly didn’t go into the last one because it was next to a builder’s yard. Fortunately I took a look and was immediately sold on it because it has a high-walled and very private garden – something I’d always wanted.”

The plot next door had originally been a dairy. Later her neighbours were a glazing company and then, after sitting empty for two years, it became the subject of an episode of Grand Designs when a young family developed the building into a home.

Barbara’s seen many changes along Lordship Lane since the 90s. “East Dulwich was very different then,” she says. “It was far less trendy. But some of the stalwarts were here, like Tandoori Nights – which is still my favourite Indian restaurant despite many other choices now.

“Then there’s the Cheese Block, Dulwich DIY and AJ Farmer – which we call The Everything Shop. It’s a bit of a shock when they don’t have something you need but it rarely happens.

“Sugar, near Goose Green, opened later but recently closed and I’m still mourning the loss of my favourite clothes shop.”

Barbara says it was when Clapham started becoming prohibitively expensive that people began moving east – and the local pubs slowly started becoming gastropubs. She says the trains to London Bridge were very unreliable back then.

“I don’t know why they had a timetable because they seemed to be just making it up. My first [housemate] moved out because she couldn’t deal with no Tube and having to get everywhere on the bus!”

As well as directing, Barbara taught at Drama Studio London for six years and then joined the voice department at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), where she worked with actors like Kenneth Branagh and Joseph Fiennes, alongside the renowned voice coach Cicely Berry, who died last year aged 92.

“East Dulwich was a great location [for working at the RSC],” she says. “It was an 18-minute drive to the RSC rehearsal rooms in Clapham and later, when I was working at the Young Vic, I would car-share with the director Tim Supple who lived nearby.”

She says the area was full of theatre people and artists because it was affordable back then.

After a year as associate director at the Young Vic, Barbara went freelance, which gave her the time to write her books. She worked in the corporate world, teaching communication, mentoring and management skills and still takes private clients.

In the early noughties she split her time between London and Le Verdier, near Toulouse, where her then husband had a house. She led a completely different life in France. They owned two horses and rode in endurance competitions and as well as her writing, she spent time clearing woods and fencing fields.

Barbara’s books Finding Your Voice and Tackling Text [and subtext] are read by actors, drama students and people who speak in public. The books explain the techniques that she teaches in her classes.

Finding Your Voice is about developing self confidence and a strong and healthy voice. Tackling Text teaches how to work with classic and contemporary texts.

The books accompany her two filmed masterclasses, Developing Your Voice and Bringing Text To Life, collectively called Actor Food, which are both available to download from her website.

Voice teaching is a very niche profession, and one that is often overlooked and unsung. Barbara has discovered that her particular brand of voice work is one of the essential processes the actors she works with use to create a character. So what drew her to the work?

“In the late 1950s my mother met a lady on a train who was an elocution teacher,” she says.

“Mum and dad wanted me to be socially confident because they weren’t and Mum was very hot on education. So I had 14 years of lessons with Mrs Melene – lessons which became cheaper and longer as time went on.

“She gave me a list of books and plays to read to get into the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama – hardly any of which were ever mentioned during the course! But it was an invaluable grounding.

“Mrs Melene had trained at Central under Elsie Fogerty, who started the school. So my tradition, as well as working with Cicely Berry at the RSC, goes right back to the beginning.

“When I was about eight she suggested I should train to be a voice teacher. I think I wasn’t a very good actor then, and my mother wanted me to teach, so I applied for Central and got in. My parents would have preferred I went to university but off I went.

“The course at Central was focused on teaching in schools but, despite having a huge respect for people who do, I knew it wasn’t for me. I got through my teaching practice on Mars Bars and tears, but came out of Central loving voice work and directing.”

Barbara graduated from the directing course at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, got an Arts Council director’s bursary and worked at the Palace Theatre in Westcliff-on-Sea. “I was supposed to be there as an assistant but I never assisted anything – I just directed eight plays,” she says.

However, she did later have the chance to assist the renowned theatre director Mike Alfreds, who founded Shared Experience.

“Nicholas Nickleby at the RSC came out of his work, which was seminal at the time in terms of adapting classic novels for the stage,” says Barbara. “I learned a huge amount from him. His book Different Every Night is well worth reading.”

Today Barbara’s role ranges from working on voice and text with theatre companies through their entire season of plays to one-on-one work with actors who are preparing for a film or TV role.

In 2006 she started working with Daniel Radcliffe in the run-up to his role in Equus and they’ve been working on his various film and theatre projects ever since. For the last six years she’s also been season associate director at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.

“One of my proudest moments was being part of the team that went on stage to collect the Olivier for best musical revival for Jesus Christ Superstar,” she says. The production, now in its third iteration at the Barbican, is about to tour America.

Barbara has also worked on To Kill A Mockingbird with Robert Sean Leonard, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in the West End and on tour, and The Ferryman at the Royal Court, directed by Sam Mendes.

She has also been involved with director Jamie Lloyd’s productions of Richard III with Martin Freeman, Macbeth with James McAvoy and Claire Foy, and Dr Faustus with Kit Harington.

Barbara worked with our local MP Helen Hayes when she was a local councillor and for many years with Olivier-nominated actress, playwright and spokeswoman for the Women’s Equality Party Athena Stevens, whose speech is affected by cerebral palsy.

She has a vast range of clients including those with sight and hearing issues and she’s done work with Freedom from Torture – a charity that works to rehabilitate victims of torture.

In 1986 Barbara trained as a healing shiatsu practitioner and discovered mindful meditation, which has been a huge part of her personal life ever since.

She learnt what she knows from Kristin Neff, who’s a leading researcher on self-compassion along with the Dutch psychotherapist Erik van den Brink.

Expanding her classes was the impetus behind creating a larger workspace and this year sees the opening of the Barbara Houseman Studio in her garden, where she will be teaching mindfulness and self-compassion alongside voice, acting and communication skills.

She’s exploring mindfulness for both actors and non-actors and offering courses in performance anxiety, confidence and public speaking.

“One of the reasons I’m drawn to these practices is because I realised I am already folding elements of them into my work,” she says. “Being a good actor is about being mindful. There’s a huge link.

“Mindfulness in acting and mindfulness in real life are really the same thing and mindfulness is one of the things that can free actors, and non-actors, from anxiety and worry and enable them to produce their best work.”

Photo by Paul Stafford

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