Audition Doctor News
Making Choices at Audition Doctor
This week, Ideastap uploaded a video of the Associate Director of the National Theatre, Anna Niland, giving advice on how to audition. The first thing that she mentioned was the importance of picking the right monologue. As an actor, the nature of the job often...
Audition Doctor as a Learning Tool
As a testament to the proliferation of learning tools for actors, The Stage have started to compile weekly lists of the best that are currently on offer. These range from apps that help you learn lines to books that offer advice and exercises. Although written...
Vocational Training at Audition Doctor
The question of whether aspiring actors should go to drama school or enrol in drama based university courses seems to be continuously debated at the moment. Both Ideastap and The Stage have devoted articles offering the pros and cons of both institutions. However,...
Shakespeare in Contemporary Drama
Mike Bartlett’s newest play, King Charles III, is written in Shakespearean verse. He described it in The Guardian as “an epic royal family drama, dealing with power and national constitution, [this] was the content, and therefore the form had surely to be...
Achieve Spontaneity at Auditions with Audition Doctor
Speaking of the rehearsal process and the nature of being part of a company, Simon Russell Beale commented: "I personally would be unable to develop a part by myself at home...I need the stimulation of other people." One of the reasons for Audition Doctor's popularity...
Taking Advantage of Opportunities at Audition Doctor
When asked the question “Why rehearse?”, Simon Russell Beale replied: “Very often we’re dealing with works of great complexity and great depth and I think its courteous to spend that amount of time...
Repetition and Rehearsing with Audition Doctor
In an interview about stage actors, Nicholas Hytner talked of the specific demands that theatre required of its practitioners: “Everyone thinks they know what actors do, they try truthfully to be other people or maybe they reveal parts of themselves through the act of...
Apprenticeships and Training After Drama School
Both Judi Dench and Helen McCrory have recently professed the importance of the continuation of training outside the confines of drama school. In her column in The Stage, Susan Elkin wrote: "Judi Dench told Patsy Rodenburg, who repeated it to me en passant,...
The Importance of Failing at Audition Doctor and Drama School
In 2008, Lyn Gardner wrote in the Guardian of the Gordion knot people faced when deciding on how to begin a career in acting. What was undisputed was the fact that "getting that training [was] crucial." However, she acknowledged that "finding the right course can be...
Theatre More Popular than Premier League Football
In the same week that Maggie Gyllenhaal claimed that the UK was the place to live if you wanted to forge a career in the acting profession, The Stage devoted an article to the trend of American actors such as Gillian Anderson and Kathleen Turner who choose to perform...
Listening
A couple of years ago, the Guardian published an article entitled "How to act: stage stars share their acting tips". Along with "preparation, preparation, preparation", the most common piece of advice was "listen". Actors often cite this ability as an absolute...
Intentions
In the Guardian last month, Sylvestra Le Touzel spoke of how many actresses felt shortchanged by Shakespeare. She spoke in light of her experience playing Lady Percy in Henry IV: “Inhabiting Shakespeare’s women can be frustrating, not because he lacked insight into...
Learning by Doing
This week on BBC Radio 4 Today, Paul Roseby, Head of NYT, reiterated his stance on drama school training. He refuted the belief that you could teach someone to act and deplored many drama school graduates as being "over moulded and over trained". He asserted that "the...
The Importance of Change
In her Q&A for the Guardian this week, Kathleen Turner cited Romancing the Stone as her favourite film because "I really like how Joan Wilder changes. Change is what attracts me to a character." At drama school auditions, candidates are often questioned on their...
Getting to the Same State Every Time
In the Guardian's "Before and After the Show" series, various actors recounted their experiences on stage. Both Lisa Dwan and Stephen Mangan spoke of the "nerve-racking and thrilling" feeling of being "hit by a truck" by the end. Mangan went onto describe the...
A New Medium
Michael Billington wrote of how "we are now in an era when the gap between film and theatre, thanks to sophisticated technology, is constantly narrowing." Filming live theatre has established a new hybrid medium. "The result is to democratise theatre. It's not just...
Training Too Many
There has recently been talk of how to address the disproportionately large number of freshly trained actors entering the industry every year. Equity President Malcolm Sinclair asserted: “Compared to when I started there are so many more drama schools and university...
Acting the Detective
When asked about some of his earliest auditions, Simon Russell Beale described them as "terrible. I knew nothing...[and] did odd things like I did a speech of Cardinal Wolesey from Henry VIII...it was odd to have a man of 22 playing a man of 60.They were odd and I...
Avoiding the Mid-Audition Slump
The reason why Audition Doctor has proved so popular is because it is known for helping students achieve that most difficult yet necessary thing - saying your lines as if for the first time. Everyone who auditions for drama school knows how cadences in the voice that...
Monologues as a Conversation
In a webchat for the Guardian, the first question that Fiona Shaw was asked was whether she recommended going to drama school. Her response was: "Yes, I advise training, you can turn from a stooped library smelling tweed-skirt wearing philosophy undergraduate into the...
Drama School – Worth the Expense
Both the Upstaged column in Ideastap and the Education and Training column in The Stage addressed the issue that most prospective actors face: How "going to drama school is increasingly like betting thirty grand on a three-year game of poker; fun, interesting, a good...
Choices
In an article in the Independent entitled "My life on stage with Shakespeare", Rory Kinnear spoke about how crucial the rehearsal process was in creating a character. "It seemed to require identifying the particular conundrums that a play and character threw up, the...
Why Do You Want to Be an Actor?
When asked what advice she would give to an actor starting out today, Gina McKee said "Ask yourself why you want to be an actor...At every step of the way keep answering the question "Why do I want to be an actor?" This is a question that is routinely asked asked at...
Shakespeare’s Birthday
The fanfare surrounding Shakespeare's 450th birthday has proven Johnathan Bates' assertion that "Shakespeare has never fallen out of fashion but in the past 25 years or so his reputation has become truly stratospheric.” There are articles delineating how phrases...