Substack is where I’ll be sharing a selection of posts from “But anyway, I digress…” which is my regular blog over on my personal website — to see all my posts in full, and for more information about my writing, head over to philipholyman.com
17th June 2025
I was at a loss as to what to feature as the image for this post, and there was no way I was going to use anything with comedy and tragedy masks on it. I stumbled upon this one, and I loved it, but apart from the fact these women will almost certainly have spoken with different accents, you shouldn’t waste any more time trying to decipher its significance than that.
We went to see Thomas Ostermeier’s production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov at the Barbican in London recently, and some interesting things were going on with the accents on stage that have brought me back to thinking about something I find really intriguing — namely, this:
Does it really matter what accent an actor uses to play a character, or does it not?
Cate Blanchett was playing Arkadina in The Seagull, and used her own native Australian accent. Hers is what is referred to as a “cultivated” or “educated” Australian accent, different from the “general” Australian accent of someone like Hugh Jackman, or the “broad” accent associated with someone like Paul Hogan or the late Steve Irwin. (The “broad” accent is also sometimes referred to as “Strine”, the word apparently derived from saying the word “Australian” through clenched teeth, which some claim arose from the need to try and keep your mouth closed when speaking in order to keep the flies out.)
Arkadina’s son Konstantin was played by the Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee, who also used his native accent. (“General,” I would guess, but if I ever have an Australian reader who can advise me better about that, I’ll gladly update this bit!) In terms of their casting as mother and son, the accents made sense — they corroborated the idea of the family relationship.
But the character of Sorin, who is Arkadina’s brother / Konstantin’s uncle, was played by the British actor Jason Watkins, speaking in British RP. There was no explanation for this disparity, no interpolated information as to why brother and sister spoke with such different accents. In practice, apart from feeling quite noticeable at first, the storytelling didn’t suffer meaningfully — and in fact, Jason Watkins was one of the two stand-outs in the show for me. So in this instance, I’d have to say the accent choices didn’t seem to matter that much.
The other stand-out in the show for me was Zachary Hart, playing Medvedenko, ordinarily a very thankless part. Not so here. The character was really dynamically present throughout, and that was nothing to do with him arriving on a quad bike or singing Billy Bragg songs and playing guitar and directly addressing the audience. Zachary Hart’s acting was great, his reading of the role really engaging and layered, but the icing on the cake (for me, at least) was him speaking in his own native Black Country accent. (He’s from Stourbridge, I’ve since discovered.)
Medvedenko works in a factory, so is socially at a remove from the actors, writers, doctors and such like that he rubs shoulders with throughout the play. There could be an argument for saying that the actor’s accent was being deployed to cement the character’s outsider status and lower social class — let’s not forget that West Midlands accents are routinely voted as the “worst” or “most hated” in opinion polls. I definitely wonder how London audiences, or audiences from overseas who may be very unfamiliar with the Black Country twang, would have responded to it. But that’s certainly not how I received it at all.
If anything, I was beaming with a bit of Black Country pride at hearing someone who spoke remotely like me up there on the Barbican stage with Cate Blanchett. (I met her once, in 2011, for all of two minutes, when I was working at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, and she arrived a bit late for a Press Night, and I assured her that her suitcase would be taken care of when she was whisked in to the show, and that brief exchange is probably the closest thing to a heterosexual awakening that I will ever have.)
One of my other favourite theatre companies is Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA), formerly known as Toneelgroep Amsterdam, and I’ve had the opportunity to see loads of their shows over the years, which are almost always performed in Dutch. The first and greatest of my experiences with their work was Roman Tragedies (which I’ve now seen twice) — a six-hour, semi-promenade, interval-free mash-up of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, with a real snake, ten minutes before the end — it’s even better than I’m making it sound.
The text they use in Roman Tragedies is translated into Dutch, like all the non-Dutch language plays they perform — so Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller are rendered in contemporary Dutch voices, with no attempt to make them sound like American ones, for example — and Shakespeare is not performed in anything resembling a blank verse style of diction, just in regular, non-heightened Dutch.
So in one sense, these plays are not being performed exactly as written — I won’t say as the writers “intended”, because that’s a bit of a nonsense — and yet while something linguistic has been lost (as it probably always is when there’s any degree of translation), these productions of these plays still function as authentic tellings of the stories of those characters. At least, I think they do. The change of accent doesn’t seem to matter.
I doubt a British company of actors would be allowed to perform American plays and characters without the accents, though, even if the resulting quality of those accents can sometimes leave a lot to be desired. But shouldn’t they be extended the same artistic freedom as the Dutch company is being given?
Would A Streetcar Named Desire be less of a play, less of an authentic experience, if instead of Southern American accents, the actors were using Yorkshire accents, or Cornish ones, or East Midlands accents? Is the Deep South only authentically evoked through accent, and not through any other factor? That can’t be true, can it?
Nobody insists on actors using Greek accents when they appear in plays by the likes of Euripides or Sophocles; no French accents for Molière; nobody insisted that Cate Blanchett or anyone else in The Seagull put on a Russian accent. (Blanchett plays an evil Ukrainian scientist in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and it’s up to you to judge the outcome.) So why does it seem to be one rule for one, and one rule for others?
Does the perception go that, since British and American (and indeed Australian) plays are using the same basic root language, the accents suddenly do matter? I’m not sure that they should; British English and American English are anyway so wildly different from one another now, and have so many variants and dialects in them, that it would be thrilling to experiment with what the nuances of those new voices could bring to the experience of watching a play. But are companies and managements willing to take that kind of particular creative risk? I suspect not.
Ivo van Hove, former Artistic Director of ITA, staged Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge in London a few years ago to great acclaim. He’d staged it in Amsterdam long before, with Dutch actors speaking the translated text in Dutch, irrespective of where the characters geographically came from.
In London, however, the British actors all spoke Arthur Miller’s text with New York accents or Italian accents, according to the requirements of their characters. It was a great show, but there were definitely times when you felt you were hearing an actor performing lines in an accent that was not their own, rather than a character speaking words in a voice that was truly theirs.
And it makes me wonder… what would it have been like if those British actors had all been using British accents — especially if they’d all been using their own?
Would the same play work as well for a British audience if you really leant into that? A Black Country version, for example… A View from (Stour)Bridge…? I’ll get Zachary Hart’s agent on the phone for a quick availability check, shall I…?