By Adam Page
It was on a trip to London, sitting in the stalls of a subsidised theatre on a Tuesday night and watching a man in a very expensive costume explain the nature of suffering to another man in a very expensive costume, when it hit me. It wasn’t gently like an insight, but the way a bailiff hits you, with paperwork and a smirk, and I realised that every single person on that stage who was allowed to talk about the soul sounded like they’d been taken out of the same golf club in Surrey. The same vowels, the same clean and sanded hospital-corridor consonants. It was the voice that you would want to read the news of your own death; reassuring and mid-Atlantic adjacent, scrubbed of anywhere recognisable. Received Pronunciation. The Queen’s English, except the Queen is dead and this voice just keeps on going, like a cockroach, into whatever comes next.
And then the comic relief walked on. From Yorkshire. Big laugh. Then Scouse. Bigger laugh. The audience, filled with publishing types, arts-council functionaries, those who use the word “text” as a verb and noun in the same sentence without irony, all just loved it. They loved the mess of it all, the warmth and authenticity. It was like they wanted to pat it on the head then put it in a heritage museum next to the mining lamps.
That seemed to be the whole racket, right there in one badly-lit fifteen minutes: the tragic hero gets RP, and the working-class voice gets to be funny or gets to be real. It gets to be downtrodden, a social problem wearing a donkey jacket but it does not get to be profound. It doesn’t get to stand centre stage and wonder aloud, in front of God and the Arts Council, just what it all means. That privilege belongs to the accent of people who have never had to wonder what it all means because they already own the building.
I should be clear about something before this runs off the rails completely, because it usually does as that’s the only way I know how to write anymore since the world stopped making the sort of sense that fits in a straight line: this isn’t an essay about accents being funny or not funny. Accents are always a little funny, my Belfast one included, everyone’s included, because language is a joke our species plays on itself. This is about permission. Who gets handed the passport to interiority and who gets stopped at the border and searched for authenticity, like it’s contraband, or there’s a hidden compartment somewhere in a Geordie vowel where the real poverty is stashed.
Let’s go back, because you always have to go back to where the rot set in, and with the English theatre it set in a long time ago. In the drawing rooms and drama schools, in a system built quietly and with patience by people who understood something the rest of us are just now, decades too late, beginning to choke on: that if you control the sound of seriousness, you control who gets to be taken seriously. You don’t need to ban the working class from the stage, you simply teach them, gently and with a smile, that their voice is a character choice. That it’s raw material and before it could ever play Hamlet, it needs to be sorted out.
They called it “voice work,” and still do. Drama schools, RADA, other big cathedrals of the craft and God bless every overworked vocal coach in the business who didn’t ask to be a foot soldier in a class war, spent the better part of a century teaching young actors from Cardiff, or Salford, or Dundee to iron the place out of their mouths. Not accent reduction; you never called it that. You called it “neutral,” or called it “standard.” As if RP were something that fell from the sky like manna, pure and placeless, when the truth is that it’s a manufactured product of nineteenth-century public schools, cooked up in the same institutions which gave us the class system, the Empire, and the very specific talent for cruelty dressed as manners that Britain has never quite managed to kick. RP isn’t the absence of an accent; that’s a very different thing. Instead, it’s the accent of people who’ve never had to think about having one, and that is one of the purest definitions of power I know: the ability to be considered neutral while everyone else is considered marked.
So, let’s say the working-class kid gets into drama school, against odds you wouldn’t bet on in Las Vegas and against a system that even now, this far into the twenty-first century, runs on the public-school pipeline like a train that never stops at your station. Then what happens? They get told, kindly and constructively, for their own good, that they’ll need to “have both”: the voice they arrived with, for the gritty kitchen-sink stuff, the state-of-the-nation plays where a chorus of the poor stand around a housing estate set explaining their economic circumstances to an audience who will then drive home to Islington. And then their other voice, the neutral, RP voice, for when they want to play a person instead of a demographic. For Chekhov or for the Greeks. For anything where the character is allowed to be tortured by the universe instead of their landlord.
Understand, this is the same machine that decided the working class could be the subject of a drama but very rarely its philosophers. Give them a stabbing, a strike, a benefits assessment, a documentary-style monologue about the bedroom tax all delivered straight up into the lighting rig; wonderful, fine, all very moving and it gets a nice write-up in the broadsheets about how it’s “unflinching” and “vital” and “a voice we don’t hear enough from” (as though the voice were a rare bird and not, you know, the majority of the country). But do not, under any circumstances, let that same voice stand there in the Donmar Warehouse and talk about time or death, or whether God exists, or what it means to betray someone you love without some critic somewhere filing it under “surprisingly poetic, for what it is.” For what it is. The whole disease summed up in four little words. As though lyricism needed a postcode, or as though a Brummie accent were constitutionally incapable of metaphysics.
Before writing this, I called up an old friend; a working actor in English theatre, decent human being who went to school here in Northern Ireland and with a lot of persistence is scratching out a living treading the boards. I asked her, straight out, what the actual day to day experience was like, working in that machine. She laughed, not a happy laugh, they kind people make when you ask them something they’ve had to explain three hundred times to people who should already know. She told me the audition breakdowns still come through, even now, even after all the hand-wringing panels and diversity initiatives and think-pieces, specifying “RP” for the lead and “regional, for comic effect” for the plucky best friend. She said she’d had directors ask her, mid-rehearsal, to “tidy it up a bit” for a scene where her character as supposed to be having a genuine, private and unwitnessed moment of grief. It seems that grief sounds better in Received Pronunciation. Apparently, the market has decided that authenticity is for scenes about poverty and neutrality is for scenes about the soul.
Just pause for a second with that, because I want it to sting you the way it stung me. Grief was rewritten to sound posher. Not the words, I mean the sound underneath the words, the grain of the human voice at its most exposed. It was adjusted like a thermostat to fit an unspoken hierarchy of whose pain is allowed to be elegant and whose pain is allowed to be evidence.
That is not an accident of taste. Taste doesn’t organise itself into patterns that consistent without someone somewhere deciding a long time ago what “good” sounds like and building a whole pipeline; funding bodies, schools, casting directories, critics with the vocabulary of missionaries describing an “authentic” native, to keep manufacturing it generation after generation. Nobody signed a memo and nobody needed to. That’s how a class system survives long past the point where anyone will admit out loud that it still exists: it stops needing enforcers and starts running on reflex. Starts running on the bone-deep assumption of ten thousand casting directors that the audience will simply believe the RP voice when it says something is true, and simply enjoy the regional voice when it’s funny, or pity it when it’s poor and never, under no circumstances, be asked to believe it when it says something is beautiful.
Somewhere around here the essay is supposed to calm down a little, find the analytical footing and offer three sensible policy recommendations and a hopeful ending, but with this, no, I refuse. I’ve read enough diversity reports commissioned by institutions that will spend forty pages diagnosing a disease they have no financial incentive to cure. The National Theatre will publish glossy documents about inclusion while the RSC still, in living memory, casts its Shakespeare with a demographic you could recreate from an Oxbridge college photo from 1983, with everybody applauding at the launch event and nothing underneath the floorboards actually moves. This isn’t a pipeline problem you can fix with a scholarship and a beaming smile for the cameras. This is a value system, and value systems certainly don’t apologise, they rebrand.
Because the ugly little secret sitting at the bottom of all this, the one nobody at the after-show party wants to say out loud with a glass of warm fizzy wine in their hand is: the “authenticity” the industry claims to desire from working-class and regional voices is not actually a hunger for truth. Rather, it’s a hunger for a specific and containable kind of truth; poverty as texture, hardship as flavour, the North as a mood board for grit. All of that can be consumed, applauded, then safely packed up like a museum exhibit at closing time. What the industry doesn’t want and doesn’t know how to fund or review, is the working-class voice as interior. As philosophy, or romance. As the voice allowed to say “I think, therefore…” without a single soul in the stalls needing it explained by a chorus, a documentary frame, or programme note about social deprivation.
And the absolute sickest part, the part that would make even a hardened cynic reach for the bottle, is how this is sold back to us as progress or inclusion, as the industry finally “platforming regional voices” when what’s actually happening is the same old velvet rope with a different sign on it. You can come in now; you can even be the subject of the play. Just don’t touch the metaphysics. They’re reserved.
I don’t have a tidy solution. If somebody is selling one, they’re selling you something else, too. But I know what it would look like if the rot actually started reversing, and it’s not a masterclass or a memo. It’s a Lear who sounds like he’s from Barnsley and it isn’t a “concept,” and it isn’t a gimmick for the marketing copy. It’s just…the play, cast the way plays should be cast, on the theory that human beings from Barnsley have contemplated mortality and madness and betrayal at the same rate as human beings from Surrey. Because that, in fact, is the simple truth of the species, whether the guardians of “serious theatre” want to hear it or not. It’s a critic who doesn’t reach for the word “surprisingly” when a Scouse voice delivers a soliloquy that breaks their heart. It’s a drama school that stops calling RP “neutral” and starts calling it what it is: just an accent among many, historically privileged, aesthetically arbitrary, and no more naturally suited to Chekhov than a Dundee brogue is naturally suited to a punchline.
Until that happens, the theatre will keep doing what it’s always done: opening the curtain, letting the posh voice tell you what it all means, and letting the rest of the country stand there at the edge of the stage, funny or suffering, waiting for someone to remember that being human was never supposed to need an accent to prove it.
The house lights go up. Everyone applauds. Somewhere backstage, someone with a perfectly good Geordie voice is being handed a script and told, gently and kindly, for their own good, to soften it. Just for this scene, the important bit, just so the audience believes it.
People will believe anything, in the right accent.
That’s the whole con. And it always has been.
