Thomas Sutcliffe: I want acting, not accents

Imagine this. A director is producing a new play, employing actors better known for television work than theatre appearances. The play is a comedy of modern manners that requires of its performers a fair amount of agility when it comes to moving between broad laughs and something far more heartfelt. So, there are tricky emotional corners to negotiate in the script, which might have been thought a sufficient challenge in itself for actors a little out of their comfort zone. And then, just as the cast come off the book and start blocking out the scenes, the director hands each of them a large glass of water and tells them that they will be expected to balance it on their heads for the entire performance, without spilling a drop.

It's not, I would suggest, a strategy likely to lead to a relaxed acting style and yet (allowing for a bit of rhetorical exaggeration) it's essentially what happens when English actors are required to adopt an American accent for a production. A feat of juggling has been added to the conventional duties any performer takes on, and with it a faint but distinct element of tension. Will the actors drop the glass altogether? Or will there be just the odd lurching wobble which ensures that no one on either side of the footlights can ever quite relax?

The anxiety, incidentally, has little to do with the imitative skills of the individual actors. Most of the English members of the audience won't be in any position to say whether the accent they hear is passable or excellent, only that it isn't natural to the person speaking and must require a certain effort to keep in the air.

So I'm not getting at any of the actors in Neil LaBute's new play Fat Pig when I say that the first night of his own production was certainly marked by a clench of apprehension about the steadiness of the accents. But the question I found myself asking was why, exactly, LaBute had chosen to impose this handicap on his cast? His play, like many of his works, is set in an unspecified American town with virtually no fixed references to geographical location. There's talk of colleagues flying in from Chicago at one point, which vaguely invites you to think that the play is set in New York, but it would take around 30 seconds to get round that problem. And since Englishmen go on dates and work in offices and visit Japanese restaurants and worry about what their colleagues will think of their new girlfriend, it is hard to think of any structural reason why the play wouldn't work just as well in an English location.

By coincidence, the Radio Times website has just conducted a survey of its users to see which British actors they thought had the best and worst American accents. You can tell quite a lot about the validity of this exercise (and the acuity of the British ear) by the fact that three actors Hugh Laurie, Anna Friel and Michelle Ryan feature in the top four of both lists. In other words, on average, the public can't tell the difference between good and bad only that something artificial is going on. But at least in these cases there was a crude commercial rationale for the simulation Hollywood television executives presumably calculating that the domestic market, tutored to believe that the British accent is a marker of perfidy and sexual perversion, simply won't wear an outsider as a series' star. If you want to hold down the title role, you have to hold down the accent, too. (As it happens, Laurie's accent is reportedly so good that the executives who auditioned him for House weren't even aware he was British until after he'd taken the part.)

But on an English stage given the right kind of play the decision to adopt a vocal disguise adds very little, and may well take a lot away. And paradoxically, one of the reasons for that is that quite a lot of us talk American already, however English our accent. Twenty or 30 years ago, there would have been a gulf between ordinary American diction and British speech that would have been vividly disclosed if you applied the "wrong" pronunciation. These days, after decades of linguistic miscegenation, that divide is often invisible. Yes, there are still phrases and words that wouldn't travel, and would sound fake in any accent but an American one. But their numbers are dwindling thanks to the voluntary Americanisation of much ordinary English speech. If the actors in Fat Pig had been allowed to use their own voices, they would have been a lot more relaxed... and we would have been less likely to assume that the dilemmas and cruelties we were watching had nothing to do with us.

More from Thomas Sutcliffe