This short vocal warm-up led by Jeannette Nelson offers actors techniques to prepare their voice ahead of rehearsals and performances, featuring exercises on breathing, resonance, projection and articulation.

Head of Voice at the National Theatre, Jeannette Nelson works on Ophelia's speech ‘O, what a noble mind...' with actor Ellie Turner. They look at vowel sound in the speech as the conduit of emotion.

Head of Voice at the National Theatre, Jeannette Nelson works on Hamlet's speech ‘To be, or not to be...' with actor Ferdinand Kingsley. They look at consonants in the speech for structure and indicating Hamlet's thought process.

The Olivier theatre is an epic space and real vocal challenge to an actor. Jeannette takes three actors through a vocal exploration of the theatre.

In a scene from Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, where Saint Joan is accused by the bishops, Sioned Jones moves between three chairs representing herself, France and God. This helps her open up the space and give a sense of breadth and surety to the speech, which is then assisted by reading the speech in unison with Chris Saul.

Chris Saul works with Jeannette Nelson, the National's Head of Voice, on a speech delivered by the Friar in Much Ado About Nothing. It's a speech Chris didn't know, and had to work on hard to understand. By reading through the verse by doing an exercise involving patting his knee on possible beats, which might be accentuated, Chris is able to help convey this meaning to the audience.

The big theatres at the National require a big focus on articulation. First Jeannette gets the actors to move their lips around, and then gives the tongue a good work-out. After relaxing the jaw and reminding the actors of the need for good support, she gets them to repeat the sounds 'da, da, da' and 'ta, ta, ta' very quickly. Jeannette's further selection of other sounds to repeat will, over time, build up an actor's ability to articulate clearly. In addition to being part of their continual...

After working on breathing and resonance, Jeannette works with the actors to open their voices up. First she gets them to do some stretching exercises to open their ribs up. Yawning opens up the throat. Sliding down from high in the voice on the sound 'Haaaaaaaaaa' needs to be done at least three times.

To achieve the feeling that the actors are speaking using their whole body, humming exercises are used to develop the voice's resonance.

Breathing exercises are an essential start to any vocal warm-up; they organise the breathing muscles, extend the capacity of the voice and give a sense of the breath very deep inside the body.

Sioned Jones and Chris Saul are struck by the width of the Lyttelton Theatre in comparison with the Cottesloe. Jeannette agrees; it requires a sense of a bigger person for a bigger space. It's particularly important to be aware of audience members in the circle; Chris delivers Polonius speech to Laertes from Hamlet to Jeannette and Sioned, who stand in the circle.

Even though the Cottesloe is a smaller 'studio' theatre, Jeannette Nelson explains that it has its own vocal challenges, which can make it as tricky to work to its full potential as the much larger Olivier. She sets actors Sioned and Chris the task of exploring the space by getting them to read to each other from different ends of the space.