Sounding like Bert

I had a chance to work with our dialect coach at last night’s rehearsal. Yes, we have a coach to make sure everybody’s accent comes from the right class—not the specifics within a mile or two, but in a show where everybody is talking about accents, they had better not suck. Alfie is brought up in Hounslow, in the west of London, and his mother is Welsh, and Higgins can hear all of that in the way he says Morning, Governor, I’ve come about a very serious matter. But the audience just needs to believe that he’s working class, that is accent, like his clothes and his gestures, are appropriate to one of the deserving poor.

Now, I have a good ear for accents, if I say so myself. My feeling is that the mimetic gift is something people have or don’t have. Some people have to learn the words individually, which takes a lot of work. I can usually mimic an accent without breaking it down into its constituent sounds. Which is lovely, but the problem is that it means I get very lazy. I just imitate in my head somebody, or a combination of somebodies. My Alfie is a bit of Stanley Holloway (of course), a bit of Ken Shabby, and a bit of Lauren Cooper. And a bit of making it up as I go along. Which get me most of the way there. But to get the rest of the way, there’s the dialect coach.

The little stuff (which is still very important) is just somebody to listen to each word and correct the stuff that sounds wrong. I have trouble with I ask you, which should be something like oyawskye, and with arrangement with its broad long a, and with clothes and clothing, neither of which have anything like a th (pardon me for not using the IPA; I never learned it; remember about me being very lazy?) and so on. Try, for instance, doing a cockney accent with glottal stopps instead of ts on Betty bought a bit of butter; “Bah!” she said, “This butter’s bitter! If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter.” So she bought a bit of butter, better than the bitter butter, put the butter in her batter, made the bitter batter better, better batter bitter butter, baiter, booter, oh, the hell with it.

The big thing is not the individual words, though. The big thing is the tone. The cockney tone is very nasal, much more nasal, actually, than I do it by instinct. I learned, over the years of being in shows and so on, to speak from my chest. To speak correctly, I would say. But then, so much of speaking cockney is speaking incorrectly. As our dialect coach put it, when I’m getting the words right, and even the melodies right, but the tone is wrong, I sound like an educated person putting on a cockney accent. Which isn’t quite sounding like Dick Van Dyke, but it’s not much better.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.