I made a point of telling Kevin Myhre (The Producing Director at SLAC) when I saw him soon after the season was announced that, yes, I would be available for THE CARETAKER – just in case he was wondering. How great would that be to work on this lovely play which I had studied in school but never encountered in production!

As a dialect coach I usually spend a fair bit of time hanging out in rehearsals. Even apart from the exciting challenges associated with the dialect work there is a tremendous amount of pleasure and stimulation to be had from simply watching how the work unfolds with a great text interpreted by a skillful, creative team in the rehearsal room.

The world of the play is so specific here and it seemed pretty inevitable that the director John Vreeke would choose to keep it in its original setting. Certainly Pinter’s rhythms seem to insist on the patter of London speech. I lived in London for about 5 years so I fancy it’s a dialect that sits easily on my tongue and in my ear. I love to use it and hear it, in part because of its associations for me. Of course whenever I recommend myself as a dialect coach skilled at or familiar with, a specific dialect, I run the same risk as the actor who says Shakespeare is her forte – does this mean Neil LaBute isn’t? Goodness no I can act (or dialect coach) anything!

Sometimes actors start with the dialect on the first day of rehearsal and sometimes they want to start well in advance. I met with Mick and Aston in the summer and it was clear they had already been putting in some hours. Davies, played by Joe Cronin is actually English by birth so much as I’d like lots of credit for his dialect I can’t really take it.

Dialect and theatre is a curious thing. It’s never just about researching a dialect and then guiding the actors towards reproducing these sounds and rhythms onstage. Sometimes you want to give a flavor of the place and period; sometimes the location is so specific and so central to the play that the actors have to be incredibly specific. The need to keep it intelligible to an audience means that I have made choices to include some sounds and exclude others. In this production the common London pattern of the substitution of an “f” for a soft “th” and a “v” for a hard “th” wherein the word three becomes free and brother becomes bruhver is not included. It’s one of those sounds that is frequent but not inevitable. What about the dropped “h”? Well in this production you will hear it sometimes and not other times. Again the issue is about clarity and intelligibility. Fortunately there is an incredible range of speech sounds within London. Walk around and you will hear all of the rules that American actors associate with this dialect broken all the time. Another issue is the period. Dialect like language evolves and thus the sounds of Pinter’s 1960’s London differ in some ways from the working class London speech of today. So you should watch Alfie for background but not East Enders.

Despite the fact that dialect is my passion I certainly don’t want the dialect to dominate. If you (the audience) are so focused on the dialect that the language is lost, the character submerged beneath it, I will have failed utterly. Hopefully the use of the dialect will just help to contextualize the play and realize the speech patterns already written into the play. Let me know.