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The Age

Tuesday August 4, 2009

John Bell

We are speaking in our own country to our own audience HOW should a Shakespearean actor sound? How did Will Shakespeare's own actors sound? Well, pretty odd, actually, to modern ears. Just as his actors would look a bit odd to modern eyes.Think about 16th-century hygiene and diet in the crowded city of London, where life expectancy for a male was just 28. They were a young company, pretty rough and robust. They came in all shapes and sizes: John Sincler (nicknamed Sinklo) was tall and skinny. For him, Shakespeare wrote roles such as Slender, Starveling and Andrew Aguecheek. Will Kemp played the fat parts �� Falstaff and Toby Belch. They were not the well-groomed, buffed and dentally perfect products of a modern drama school. And they didn't have the rounded vowels and standard accent produced by a NIDA or VCA, because there was no standard or accepted accent; not until the 18th century when Dr Johnson and his great Dictionary fixed not just the meaning of words, but how they should be pronounced in polite society. Before then, how you spoke depended on where you came from.Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare had a rich Warwickshire brogue that has been reconstructed by modern scholars. To our ears, it has a Scottish burr. Other actors in the companies he worked with came from Devon, from Northumberland, from Ireland and Wales. Their speech on stage was a rich stew of vowels and cadences. Queen Elizabeth spoke with a cockney twang, as did many of her courtiers.But putting accent or dialect aside, oratory was highly prized and good public speaking �� in the law courts, in the pulpits and in the theatres �� was one of the chief attributes of the civilised man or woman. The Queen herself was a formidable orator.Young actors from the choir schools were apprenticed to established actors and taught their craft. A good voice and perfect diction were basic requirements. One of the great actors of the day, Edward Alleyn, had a voice that could be heard across the Thames. Then, as now, accent or dialect was less a consideration than a powerful and emotive voice with graceful cadences and many shades of expression.Some time during the 19th century in England, at least, Shakespeare became "respectable" and his plays selectively raided by politicians, parsons and headmasters for quotations that would endorse the policies and sentiments of the empire, the church and the establishment. Shakespeare became a "classic" and had to sound like one. To listen to recordings of the great Shakespearean actors of the first half of the 20th century is to hear the received pronunciations of Whitehall and Piccadilly.But in the 1950s, a revolution began. Brilliant young actors from the provinces (Albert Finney, Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris) began to storm the London stage and bring their regional dialects with them. The rich stew of spoken English was stirred up again and Piccadilly started to sound a bit twee. Today, you will hear a wide range of dialects at the National and the RSC, not to mention the more radical and fringe companies.Most American actors no longer feel the need to whack on a pommy accent when speaking Shakespeare, and instead employ their own regional dialects, some of which are much closer to the 16th-century sound of Shakespeare than is standard southern English.And so it should be in Australia, too. As long as our actors are taught to exploit the timbre and range of their voices, to experiment with their emotive power, to employ clear diction and sharp articulation, accent is no consideration. We are speaking in our own country to our own audience. Until we are comfortable with our own voice, we can never own the material, be it Shakespeare or any other.What we must do is realise that there is no one Australian accent; there are dozens. A modern-day Henry Higgins could tell what state you come from, what school you went to, where your forebears hailed from. A Melbourne lawyer sounds different to a Queensland cane-cutter to a Perth policeman to a Sydney vet. The shade of Australian accent you choose will depend on whether you are playing Hamlet, the gravedigger or the foppish Osric. But they will all be Australian. I suppose the point is best illustrated by a production in which I played Hamlet in 1972 at Sydney's Nimrod. The critic Katharine Brisbane commented what a relief it was to hear the play spoken with Australian accents. We were all somewhat surprised, because the question of ��accent�� had never crossed our minds �� we were just doing the play.- John Bell won a J.C. Williamson award at the 2009 Helpmann Awards last week for his contribution to Australian theatre.Bell Shakespeare's production of Pericles is at the Playhouse from Thursday until August 22.

© 2009 The Age

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