Showing Off

Every time I get a new job, it's as a result of an audition. Even at the grand old age of 56, the number of times where the phone rings and my agent says that somebody has made a direct offer are few and far between. This is understandable. The casting decisions made are now in the hands of younger people. People who may have seen me on television, but don't know me, and knowing somebody, or rather getting to know them, is surely what an audition is all about.

I auditioned hundreds of young people for the National Youth Theatre every year from 1984 until 2010. Sometimes in the late 80s, when work as an actor was thin on the ground, I would spend day after day during January and February working for the youth theatre seeing up to 45 aspiring young people every day. It was a tiresome process. The occasions on which the next Helen Mirren or the next Daniel Craig stepped into the room were very few and far between.  The irony of it is of course that I wasn't  doing auditions on the day that Daniel auditioned,  Although I did look after him on his first year in the youth theatre and he was on my course. Playing Agamemnon in a military rain mac standing on a dining room table........ as you do!

The sort of audition I have to attend nowadays normally involves reading from a script. It's the easiest kind. You read it in the way you intend to play it, and the director decides whether he likes it or not. These days you're normally expected to show the whole of what you think will be your performance at the audition. There are good directors around, but the directors who know how to really work with actors and get them to change what they do, are few and far between.

In my younger days when I used to audition for theatre jobs, that would almost always involve doing an audition piece - a speech of probably around two minutes, taken from a play,  and presented, most possibly, out of context.

In my final year at drama school I stumbled across a speech about being boring from a little-known play called "The Great Exhibition" by David Hare. It served me well for many years. The mistake that most people make in an audition is that they think it's all about showing off the acting. The younger the actor, the more emotionally draining the speech they've prepared will be. Comedy or any vestige of believable or natural behaviour, they feel, doesn't show the full range of emotions that they'll need every single time they act. Of course in reality, I think, they couldn't be more wrong. Great acting doesn't show itself off. It just happens. You are engrossed and totally caught up in what the actor is doing. You then sit back after its all over and say " Oooh, that's great acting". You shouldn't really be aware of it at the time.

So often the auditionee forgets that the people on the other side of the table  are an audience. They may be an audience who ultimately will have the power to make a decision, but they are an audience. Like all audiences,  they need to be entertained. They need to be engaged. A speech telling them how your milkman's cat was abused as a kitten, and the deeply disturbing psychological effect this has had on you, probably won't do that. If it involves shouting, ranting, and crying, I can guarantee it almost certainly won't do that. Most acting is about behaving. It's about reacting, and letting us see a real person, albeit in an artificial situation.

The audition is probably the most artificial situation of all. You stand alone in an empty rehearsal room or on a stage in front of a group of people with notepads and you pretend that you're interacting in a play. Or you choose a speech that directly addresses the audience, and run the risk of making the auditioners feel incredibly uncomfortable.

 The good thing about an audition showcasing in a theatre is that, as the audience, you can sit back in the dark and even though every single student auditioning chooses to address you, you can feel safe.

On Friday I attended the Oxford University showcase at the Duchess Theatre. An opportunity for 11 young actors currently at Oxford to show what they can do. In the bar afterwards they all seemed perfectly pleasant, engaging, accessible, and probably clever (Although I suppose that, these days, even being at Oxford isn't a guarantee of that).

 On the stage however, only one of them had caught my eye for standing up there with two minutes believable and engaging behaviour. Far too many had chosen key emotional breakdown moments from the plays, so for two minutes they were busily depicting a life crisis which we had no real chance of accessing. No chance for us to see what they might be like as people then. That is ultimately what an audition is about. What is this person like? Your best resources as an actor are also your character traits as a person. You are the best you there is. That doesn't mean that everything you play is typecasting, but it does mean that people will choose you because of who you are, as much as for what you do.

 The Oxford University gang were not well served by the presentation of their showcase either. These days the drama schools offer sleek sophisticated showcases where, although it may be 15 or more students doing individual pieces, the directors style them into something that captures the audience's imagination and engages the people watching. Eleven actors, just coming centre stage one after the other, and delivering a speech at the front is probably not my ideal way of spending a Friday lunchtime. Plenty of wine afterwards, but as a nondrinker I missed the fact that there wasn't even so much as a stuffed cherry tomato. I had missed my lunch to attend remember! Good to hear that some of those young actors involved have already got agents, which is refreshing as I don't think anybody would be getting one out of Friday lunchtime

Two young friends of mine, Joan Iyiola and Polly Bennett, have started a wonderful thing called The Mono Box. They wrote to many successful actors, directors, and writers and asked them to submit audition speeches that they felt were particularly effective. They have collated all this material into a fabulous collection, which is available one Sunday a month that the actors Centre for young actors to peruse, and choose a speech that they feel works for them.  It's a brilliant idea and one that which has attracted a lot of support and interest-rightly so, and if it leads to a generation of young actors coming into the room with better, more engaging, and funnier speeches, that's all to the good for those of us who have to sit and watch them.