Accent Coach

Our Country's Good has a variety of different accents so we had an accent coach who came in to work with us. He was a Scottish man called Gary and he's worked with many different actors, drama schools, theatre companies, etc. I was very exited to work with him and he was immediately quite assertive in what he wanted from us because we only have this week and the next with him.

The first lesson we were introduced to different "zones" of the mouth/throat. When you use these different zones, your voice and accent may change and as you use the zones you realise how different accents use different parts of their mouths that we don't. So I found some of them quite hard. I found than when I used zones at the front of my mouth my voice sounded deeper whereas zones in the back of my mouth sounded higher. The positioning of the tongue really does affect a lot in terms of sound and slight movements and changes to position changes a lot of things. We did some work with the northern accent as that was his natural accent and it would be easier to teach us that as we all know what it sounds like.
For example; the "L" sound made in the northern accent is different than that of a Londoner accent because Scots do what is called a "Heavy L" and that is where the tongue touches the back of the teeth but curves down whereas the one in a Londoner accent, the tongue stays straight or curves slightly upwards. The end of some words are elongated and some consonants are dropped to form a Scottish accent.
After we did that, he said that if you ever forget your lines onstage and are doing an accent, learn whatthe hesitation for that accent would be. That way you won't break the illusion. Gary also said to research the history of the accent you're doing, the dialect and how it came to be what it is.
The accent I'll be doing is RP (Received Pronunciation) which is spoken by those of a middle class or "Queen's English". I have a quote from Wikipedia that briefly explains the history of RP:

"RP is often believed to be based on the Southern accents of England, but it actually has most in common with the Early Modern English dialects of the East Midlands. This was the most populated and most prosperous area of England during the 14th and 15th centuries. By the end of the 15th century, "Standard English" was established in the City of London.[16] A mixture of London speech with elements from East Midlands, Middlesex and Essex, became known as Received Pronunciation. By the 1970s it was estimated that 3% of British people were RP speakers."

The following lesson we focused more on our individual accent that we would be doing. I, as earlier mentioned, am doing RP and that means articulating every vowel and consonant. I have a habit of sometimes dropping my consonants and not opening my mouth very wide when I speak, but with RP you need to use your mouth, face muscles and tongue a lot more when you speak. You can't rush speech either or you will trip on words, so taking time will allow you to make more sense of your sentences and make them clearer. There is also a way you carry yourself when you speak with this accent. You can't speak in this accent and slouch, it doesn't match up. Plus, when I do this accent it makes me feel prestige so I work on my posture and how you communicate with others. As officers, we are sophisticated men so the note on posture and interaction is for us all.