Asked if she had any advice for aspiring performers, the actress Pamela Brown once said: “Yes, get on, say the wordies loud and clear, and get off.”

But whether because they have Marlon Brando and the Method at the back of their minds, or hope for a career in mumbling Hollywood, or are just incompetent, wordies on the stage are progressively getting less loud, less clear, more chaotic and scrambled. Wordies are becoming burblies.

It’s a serious and growing problem. I have decent hearing and, as a privileged critic, invariably get a good seat; but I regularly find myself elongating my neck like some desperate giraffe as an otherwise gifted young actor fails to achieve what’s surely the minimum required: to be audible. Nick Barter, recently principal of RADA, had to institute what he’d never dreamed necessary: classes in diction and articulacy.

Some theatres don’t help, and not only the big West End variety. The Olivier has had acoustic problems, as has the Old Vic. But if our finest classical actors – Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Simon Russell Beale, Antony Sher – can manage to combine subtlety with clarity, why not their successors?

But there are exceptions. Three young performers who are as crystalline as they’re skilful: Eve Best, Victoria Hamilton and Stephen Wight, the dopey waiter in Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice.

Three fine young performers who could improve their diction: Tom Hardy, the lead in the National’s recent Man of Mode; Sally Phillips, the TV actress in Pinter’s People at the Haymarket; and sadly, Ewan McGregor, whose Iago in the Donmar’s Othello whizzes over Shakespeare’s lines the way Evel Knievel leapt across buses.

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