The news that Richard E Grant’s late wife, the renowned dialect coach Joan Washington, used to assume an Aberdonian accent whenever she wanted to haggle over a potential purchase, is enough to make you drop your aitches. But what offensive masquerading, what terrible pigeonholing, is this? And then you discover that it was not an impersonation, but a reversion: Washington was returning to the inflections of her Granite City youth, before life as a drama student in London prompted her to adopt received pronunciation (ie, home counties posh). If she thought it was fine to go full Scottish to intimidate antiques dealers who believed that her countrymen and women know how to drive a hard bargain, then who am I (blandly SE England, madly jealous of regional accents) to object?
It all depends on where you’re standing. The very first line of a piece I read on an Irish website when the trailer for The Banshees of Inisherin first hit the screens queried whether Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan, all three of them Dubliners, would be able to carry off west of Ireland voices. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed America counselled its would-be movie-goers that the film’s accents “can be a little difficult to understand if you’re not, well, Irish”; the difference between Achill Island and Dún Laoghaire was a distinction too far.
