Rant #3: Speaking in Accents

Every once in a while I like to talk about something that makes me spitting mad. And this article on the NY Times arts blog got me thinking about my #1 pet peeve in theatre: the pointless mastery of accents.

I can’t imagine a bigger waste of time than having a broad range of accents and dialects at your disposal. And yet many actors spend their precious life energy -- time they could be using to learn judo or tap dance or something else that actually enhances your stage presence -- learning how to do just that.

I know many people think that without someone speaking a perfect Irish accent the audience will not enter into the world of The Lieutenant of Inishmore. But I have found the opposite to be true. And I just don’t get why you’d care.

Actually I do get why you might care. That’s why it bothers me. Because when I was in college I spent hours listening to British and Southern and Irish dialect tapes. It was something I could easily master and write down on audition forms and display at parties as an example of Something I Know How To Do. And if I was cast in a play I could spend all my time focusing on the easiest, most graspable aspect of it: the accent.

In my present life, I don’t need to master an accent because I do not act in plays that require them. (I act in plays that require you to be yourself with quotation marks, which I’m sure some people find equally annoying). But I do still watch plays in which actors are speaking in accents, and I always find it distracting and I always wish the director had decided to not bother with it. Good accents have never made me love a performance. In fact there is nothing more annoying to watch onstage than an actor who has effortlessly mastered a dialect (except of course for an actor who is painfully butchering one). There’s a flair and a self-consciousness in their delivery that says LOOK AT ME, I’M SPEAKING PERFECT BRITISH. Or South African. Or god help us, Russian.

It’s just a waste of time, in my opinion. For everyone involved. And then to justify that waste of time, actors inflict their mastery on innocent people at parties, people who are just trying to have a conversation and don’t want to hear you launch into guv’nor, fancy a bite to eat, what for NO REASON AT ALL.

Honestly, I’m trying to think of one reason why speaking in an accent would improve the quality or depth or intellectual merit of a play at all, and I can’t. The only reason I can think of is to show off. And if you want to show off, I’d much rather you dress head to toe in sequins and sing me a show tune. Well… as long as it isn’t this show tune. (that is another pet theatre peeve: fifteen year old girls singing On My Own at musical theater auditions. But I can’t in good conscience rail against that since that’s how I spent my adolescence).

UPDATE: see, the Guardian agrees with me.