Writing Dialogue in Accents

THE PLAYWRITING SEMINARS > CONTENT > CHARACTERS > LANGUAGE > ACCENTS

'. . . I didn't set out to write a play about art forgery. For me, 36 VIEWS is more about how we navigate a different culture. All the characters in the play are experts in a field, and yet despite their expertise, they're struggling with something that's foreign to them. Having to make sense of alien worlds interests me a great deal, as does the related question: How do you make sense of another human being, of a consciousness very different from your own?'

-- Naomi Iizuka

When a character walks into your head spouting an accent that seems to demand phonetic reproduction in your script . . . Resist. Even if Eugene O'Neill occasionally did it, that approach drives readers to clean their glasses or water their contacts far more than you'd ever want. And the harder you try to duplicate those combinations of letters and punctuation marks to replicate that accent, the more indecipherable your script will be.

Here's the key: a script on the page is mostly about plot, character, and -- most important -- that " something that matters". That's what's important, not the odd accent of your characters. Literary Managers can always ask you what your characters really sound like in your head.

In the good old days, you could gain some points by laboring over the sort of thing Sean O'Casey did for Irish accents in JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK . . .

					JOHNNY
		Bring us a dhrink o' wather.
		. . .
		Tay, tay, tay! You're always thinkin' o' tay. If a Man was dyin',
		you'd thry to make him swally a cup o' tay!

But nowadays, most contemporary playwrights write dialogue for a character who speaks with an accent by simply capturing the rhythm and any odd word order of the accent. If it's really dense and obscure in real life, they'll sometimes add an opening stage direction explaining what it should sound like. But they write it like it's nearly conventional English.

Here's what Martin McDonagh did for Irish accents in THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE half a century later. . .

					RAY
		Are they a bit stale, now?
					(Chews)
		It does be hard to tell with Kimberleys.
					(Pause)
		I think Kimberleys are me favourite biscuits out of any biscuits.
		Them or Jaffa Cakes.

And here's the exception to the rule . . .

For FUDDY MEERS, David Lindsay-Abaire has a character -- a stroke victim -- whose dialogue is written phonetically and is so incomprehensible that he has to add a long note at the end of the script with a translation into ordinary English of everything GERTIE says. And the play has been produced all over the place by regional theatres and even a commercial production in New York. So what made this work? GERTIE dialogue can't be understood by anybody -- readers or most of the characters in the play. And that makes it intriguing instead of an annoyance.

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