So, the Stratford Festival made a revolutionary (at the time) decision back in the sixties to have all actors use their natural dialect/accent instead of the mid-Atlantic accent that was the rule before then (and remained the rule in many places well into the 1980's). I applaud this -as anyone that knows me, I'll go on and on about how modern "English Accents" have little to do with how Shakespeare sounded and Americans who put on these artificial accents only separate their audiences further from the words.
But here's the trick about Stratford- some of the Canadian actors have Canadian accents and some are British emigrates who have natural English accents- and there's another group of older actors who have put on some version of Mid-Atlantic or semi-English accents and you can tell that it's because that's how they've been doing it their entire lives. So, with all three of the sounds coming from stage- it's just a bit confusing!
No Crystal Ball
1 week ago
3 comments:
Yeah, but that "confusion" seems to be the inevitable result of using "natural" language with no one staging an accent - in North America.
I've noticed in my last few trips to Arizona that Anglos' speech has become more and more influenced by
Spanish ... Anglo Arizonans used to all speak like John McCain, more or less.
There are so many North American dialects, and they're so fluid. In a cast of 15-20, it's going to be hard to get any kind of "coherent" sense of place from the accents, except by (horrors) having everyone try to master and stage a particular fake accent - and probably fail.
Woe is me. And you.
True, but as soon as you put a regional American accent on stage, it affects how the audience views that character.
You know, we directors are always placing our Shakespeare productions all over the country-but seldom do we give those regional accents to the characters. A few years ago, we did Much Ado set in the American South. I wanted to do southern accents, but was worried that it would be so distracting that it would be the only thing people would think about.
I grew up out west and my family is from the Pacific Northwest- but I have affected a bit of an east coast accent in later years. So, what in the world would that say about a character in a play that takes place in Italy by a 16th century Englishman - and the character is supposed to be from a different city- where they may have spoken a very distinct dialect?
Yup.
It's one of those things that has, I think, no one right answer. If a company does an otherwise good job of one of Shakespeare's plays, but happens to have what I might feel are affected accents, I'm probably going to be OK with it.
But I do think that the confusion factor may eventually drive people back to some convention or other, like that mid-Atlantic thing, just to avoid the whole Tower of Babel thing.
We'll see.
Like the French Revolution: "too early to tell ..."
Post a Comment