Floating Ah-rs, Softer tees and other accent-dental adventures - Polish 5, Sunday March 22

We are on London, in the 1990s. We have four people from diverse backgrounds. They all speak English. And not our colonialist rubbish - they speak the Queen's English. But...no one would actually speak like the Queen. And come to think of it, they wouldn't speak exactly like one another. And as a company we are moving rapidly through the polish phase of work, so it was time to sit down with a celebratory box of TimBits and figure out how we sound.

We have a resident UK expert on the team, as L has something of a working knowledge of the way people in England speak. (I'm being silly again). So I asked L to look over the script and think about the rehearsals to pull out the accent slips that bug her the most. On the whole, I do want to give back pats to the intrepid Canadians on cast who are clearly doing good work in getting the voice down - in some cases relearning phonetically. Still, we can all improve and so we went over the common problems and worked on shifting focus from the from to the rear of the mouth, to dampen the t's and float the "r"s. Also good to keep in mind: when asking a question the pitch drops rather than our North American habit of going up a tone to indicate a question. I must say, reinforcing that speech habit alone made a big difference to the way I heard Scene 6. In other accent news, we can no longer say the word DOCTOR because it now sounds absurd - you know, when you repeat a word over and over until it loses all meaning? Try it, it's weird. dawc-tah. Weird. Big thanks to Laura for lending us her ears.

With the accent talk out of the way, I only had full cast called for the morning work sessions so we hopped right into work-through mode. It was a speedy but productive morning that brought a bit more gleam to scenes 5 and 6.

The afternoon was all about Anna and Larry. For once, I had UNDERBOOKED rehearsal time! Instead of just doing a moment to moment spit polish on 4 (Aquarium) and 9 (Museum), we were able to spend considerable time on the Anna/Larry section of the exquisitely horrible scene 6 Domestic Interiors. Larry's emotional collapse is such a specific and damaging moment. We found news ways to make it hurt. Yay! I mean, good work.

Sunday was our first rehearsal with our brand new SM - SARAH! Huzzah! For me, I was still getting used to having someone to give line notes, so it was a very welcome addition to have her in the room.

Rehearsal was followed by a Production Meeting, and we had a chance to realize that progress is being made in all quarters - my focus has been with my little chicks in the cast, and it was great to get all ther other stakeholders together to see that we really are making leaps and bounds forward. Also, I can now set the schedule for April with greater confidence. GAK! APRIL!!! So soon?

On the sniffle front. Um. yes. Don't drink from my soda can yet, ladies and gents. I will recover. I will recover. I will recover. Affirmations are good. Affirmations are good. Affirmations are g....

On The Hour

Consider this both dialect study and a bit of fun - Patrick Marber was one of the main writer/performers in the classic radio comedy programme. I'm posting the first one, and welcome you to listen to the series on Youtube channel.

"Later: who pays for our cheese?"

BBC Voices

Here's a BBC site which offers a wide variety of accent and dialect examples - not coaching, but an interesting resource, and also a look at the cultural significance of voice in the UK. Here is a useful cache of sound files for RP

Contemporary RP audio

http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/text-only/received-pronunciation/london/

Check out the British Library site on UK dialects - the contemporary RP audio file and description is particularly useful