Let the Showcase begin.

It’s Showcase Time!

That heady season when the drama schools not only invite us in to look at their latest spawn, but actually thrust them out into the wide world to occupy the stages of the West End for a lunchtime and deliver to a motley collection of agents and industry professionals their carefully picked monologues in return for a stuffed cherry tomato and a glass of warm white wine.

It is at this time that most graduates forget that they actually want to be actors. Now they just want to be an agent’s client. For many, getting an agent looms larger than getting a job. Yes, it is helpful to get an agent, but it’s not the be all and end all.

Many years ago, on a lunchtime in the late seventies, we all trouped down from Manchester Polytechnic (Oh How that word dates me!) to the Garrick theatre in London to do our agents showcase. Afterwards we mingled hesitantly in the bar, under strict instructions to let the agents get to the food first! As if they don’t eat! No one approached me, and I didn’t get signed.

A few weeks later we did the same showcase in the rehearsal room of the Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester for a small batch of Northern agents and the directors of the theatre. A week later I still had no agent, but I had a five month contract with the Royal Exchange in my hand starting three weeks after I left drama school.

Five years later, and an awful lots of jobs later, I got an agent. Things are a little different now, but it still merits to put thoughts of the acting first and the agent second. And what of choosing material for the showcase. That award-winning-knock-em-dead-in-the-aisles speech that will have directors and agents alike clamouring for you?

It's so easy when preparing for a showcase to forget the one element that undoubtedly will win over the people you're auditioning for. Entertain them. Engage them.

 So often people pick an audition speech because they think that the material will "show off"  their acting. But, of course, we never really notice great acting. When we are in the presence of it in the theatre, we aren't thinking "That's great acting". We are just totally caught up in the story. At the end of the evening we may realise that we've seen a remarkable piece of performance. But rarely at the time.

So often audition pieces are chosen because the actor feels that they allow them to run the whole gamut of emotions from A to B. They can tear their heart out, and rent their spleen about how their cat was abused in kitten hood by next-door's milkman, or some other sensational topic.

For the people sitting on the other side of the table, for whom this is the fourth example of pet/dairy abuse they've had to listen to that day, it's hardly likely that they will be endeared to you from the use of this material. So often the big emotional speeches from plays are at a point that the audience has had to reach during the previous 90 minutes of performance. It's impossible to access them straight away, and feel their true emotional power in a two-minute splurge.

 Material that shows a little humanity, and that raises a smile from the people who are listening is usually just so much more effective. It allows them to see you being a real person, someone they might work with.

The people behind the table are willing you to be right for whatever it is they're casting. Remember, until you open the door and go into the room, you have the job! If they, or the casting director, have done the job correctly, you should be suitable for the role, and what they want to see is who you are.

This can be difficult. It touches on who you are as a person, and it can take years to become comfortable with that. I know that throughout my 20's I went into auditions thinking 

"I'm an actor  - what would you like me to be?". 

As a result I probably came across as nothing in particular, bland and unmemorable.Now I'm perfectly happy to go into an audition room  thinking; 

"This is me. This is Paul Clayton. This is what I am."

 If I don't get the job it's not because I'm not good. It's because I'm not right. And there's a big difference.

There are excellent resources  out there such as The Mono Box, to help you find that speech that suits you as well as innumerable audition speech anthologies. Keep your eye out for something that makes you smile. You could even go further. Something that makes you laugh. There's comedy in "Hamlet" remember.  It so much easier to see your humanity through a smile.

The pressures of being part of a showcase will no doubt impede on you. You may have been given your piece and had no choice in it. If so, question the person who gave it you as to what they think it brings out in you particularly and why they want you to do it. They are trying to create a show. It would be slightly imbalanced if all twenty-one pieces in a drama school showcase were enormously amusing. Imbalanced, but fun. I’d go to that one!

You are the best you there is. Just make sure that your material shows that.