One of the many challenges for Bay Theatre Players’ actors is adopting just the right accent for the part they are playing.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
So, for example, for a British or American play the cast has to spend a lot of both personal and on-stage rehearsal time not just learning their lines, but also studying pronunciation and how the words are used.
British and American English, and even New Zealand English is often very different to Australian English!
Please have some sympathy, then, for the cast of Bay Theatre Players’ current production of A Murder is Announced!
First of all the actors have to perfect the English soft ‘a’ in words like dance and plant and also to adopt the British ‘t’ in party instead of the Australian pronunciation which makes the word closer to ‘pardy’.
And there are the colloquialisms, such as “Pip and Emma”, the names of two of the mystery characters. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the words, and indeed the names, are a play on the First World War signallers’ name for the letters pm (post meridiem). The signallers’ name for am is “ack emma”.
A Murder is Announced is set in 1952, and so the language is not just British English, but the British English of the 1950s when the world was a very different place from today, both there and in Australia.
So, please come along and hear our dedicated and hard-working cast recreate the English of the 1950s and try and solve a classic ‘whodunnit’ mystery!
A Murder is Announced was adapted by Leslie Darbon from a story by Agatha Christie.
Directed by Jack Helmore, the play begins when a strange notice appears in the morning paper of a perfectly ordinary small English village, Chipping Cleghorn: “A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29, at Little Paddocks, at 6.30pm. Friends accept this, the only intimation.”
Tickets are available from Bargain Box (4472 5984). Remember, there are only 10 shows.
And, don’t forget tonight’s (June 21) reading of The Full Monty, at the Playhouse in Gregory Street at 7pm.
The Bay Theatre Players are a very active community theatre company operating our own theatre.
The group presents 3 to 4 productions each year, encompassing a broad range of Australian and International comedy, drama, farce, and musicals.
The Bay Playhouse has seating for up to 97 patrons. There are actually no "bad" seats in our little theatre.
