Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone in the 2005 Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd.”LONDON — It’s only when you come to this city and hear British actors playing Americans that you realize how funny we all talk. I’m kidding, of course, but after listening to the peculiar nasality of some of the accents in the Old Vic revival of John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation,” I found myself wondering whether the twang-free voice I’d always assumed I’d been speaking in sounded so very peculiar to the British. I’ve been working on something grander-sounding and mid-Atlantic ever since.
Accents can cause unusual problems for actors. First-class training doesn’t necessarily instill the ability to master different voices; it’s a particular aptitude that comes more naturally to some than others. I adored Patti LuPone’s darkly funny performance as Mrs. Lovett in the recent Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd,” but I have never before heard an Englishwoman of any class or period – fictional or otherwise — speaking with quite the same quirky intonations. (Video of Ms. LuPone and the rest of the cast of the Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd” is here.)
Nor did I recognize the voice of Lesley Manville’s Ouisa in “Six Degrees” as resembling any I’d heard in New York, uptown or down. It was at least a little consoling to recall that British actors face the same vocal challenges performing American classics that Americans do when tackling the (virtually ubiquitous) British plays on our stages. We are often left wincing at half-on, half-off British accents on Broadway, which is one reason, I suppose, that so many British plays travel with their casts intact.
In the case of “Six Degrees,” in which many in the cast struggled with accent problems (the young man from Utah sounded more like a Texas cowboy), I wondered whether it might not be better to chuck the accents altogether and simply allow the actors to play the roles in voices that came naturally. Yes, the play is New York-specific, and a tale of a particular social milieu, but it is more profoundly a story of the liberating power of the imagination to forge links between people of disparate experience.
To hear it with British accents might be more universalizing than discombobulating. It certainly would go easier on American ears, although of course it’s probable that most in the audience didn’t register the vocal oddities that I did. A bad accent can irrevocably mar a good performance, or a good production.
Then again, there are other plays that would be inconceivable in transposed accents. “Jerusalem,” Jez Butterworth’s beautiful, funny and mournful comedy about the fraying fabric of English culture, is steeped in a specific language that simply wouldn’t sound the same without the specifics of vocal inflection.
But then you reflect that Shakespeare is readily done without English accents by Americans – in fact it seems peculiar when it is. And most of his histories, at least, are quite specifically English and feature characters whose rank in society is signaled in every syllable they speak. We have become accustomed to Americans doing Shakespeare in their own way.
Have you had experiences with wayward or wonderful voices onstage? Feel free to share them as I go off to practice my new voice. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain, I am told.
Loading tweets...
From the auditions to the finale, all the latest news and reviews from this season of ‘American Idol.’ 
