Audition Doctor News
What Can an Acting Coach Give You?
TA short while ago, The Stage ran a piece entitled "What can an acting coach help me with and how do I find a good one?" It featured two experienced acting coaches - Dee Cannon and Martin Harris. The fact that the paper is devoting an entire page to sharing "about...
What Does Training Give You?
There has been much debate recently over the usefulness of drama schools. Derek Jacobi averred: “It can teach you movement, it can teach you voice, it can teach you deportment, it can teach you fencing skills, all sorts of things. But I firmly believe that it cannot...
Shakespeare at Auditions
The announcement of Rufus Norris as new Artistic Director of the National Theatre coincided with another disclosure. Although it was admittedly not as newsworthy as said appointment, it was no less important for students who are eager to go to drama school. It was the...
Tilly Blackwood’s interview with Don’t Be So Dramatic
Drama School Applications – Open Now
The forward march of autumn signals the advent of that sentence that many applicants have nervously been waiting for on drama school websites – Applications for September 2014 are now open. Download application form here. While it can often feel like you are one of...
Striking the Balance
When asked what advice he would give for any actor starting out, James McAvoy replied “Advice is difficult for me, because everyone’s journey is so personal and different. Everyone’s style is so personal and different. What makes anyone good is so personal and...
What Is the Point of a Final Year Showcase?
It is commonly acknowledged that the final year showcase at drama school is the figurative starting gate to an actor's career. There are stories of actors whose trajectories segue seamlessly from showcase to well-known agent to BBC1 television series. Rather...
Rehearsing For Your Audition
Many will have noticed that in the initial letter from various drama schools, aside from delineating the acceptable length of speeches, what timeframe constitutes as “modern”, the precise date and time of your preliminary audition, there will be general advice. Some...
Drama School Applications Soar
This week the Stage announced that figures from the University and Colleges Admissions Service show that the number of applications to drama courses for 2013 have increased by 7.3%, with nearly 50,000 made. The expectation that applications would slump drastically due...
Drama School – The Agent’s Scouting Ground
When Joel Fry (currently starring in Public Enemy at The Young Vic) was asked in an Ideastap interview whether he thought peopIe need to go to drama school, he replied: "I don’t think they need to, but it can be quite a lot of fun. It’s the opportunity to hang around...
And So It Begins
With September just round the corner, the inevitable preparation for drama school auditions begins. Most preliminary auditions begin in November and beginning the groundwork in September can seem premature to an outsider. However, candidates who have applied before...
Training Elsewhere
No one in the arts world would deny the advantages of having a commercial success. Money is always short and the profits from lucrative shows often fund less economically viable, yet artistically daring productions. However, England is currently saddled with a Culture...
Training To Be Fluent In All The Languages of Theatre
Much has been made recently of the need for British drama schools to widen their curriculum to accommodate the ever-changing nature of the acting industry. Drama school graduates, such as Tom Hopper, have mentioned that though the training is heavily focused on stage...
Acting Corporate
What's been clear this week is that while drama school isn't a panacea to all the insecurities of the profession, actors who haven't gone accede that the work done there appears to be an indispensable infrastructure upon which to build a solid career. In a Q and A for...
Training – Not Just At Drama School
Susan Elkin, The Stage's Education and Training Editor, was asked so often whether drama school was a necessity that she wrote an article arguing why the widely-held misconception of “if you can act or sing, surely you can just stand up and do it” was palpably...
Auditioning Against The Odds
Although Michael Simkins' article in the Guardian was hardly a paean to the acting profession, it was an honest account of the fickle nature of the business with all its highs and lows. In “Is Acting Today Just Too Tough?” he talks of the harsh demands of...
Acting For Free
Today, Lyn Gardner asked the question: “Would you do your job – the one you've been trained to do – for free?” She was referring to the unfair yet widespread practice of professional actors working for free on the London Fringe and other events such as Edinburgh....
Auditioning for Drama School
If only The Observer's account of Mark Rylance's method of auditioning was the norm for all drama school auditions. While they are rarely the “shouty, humiliating exercises, usually of no more than two minutes duration” that the journalist describes, at the initial...
How To Get Into Drama School – Don’t Be A Show-Off
It's easy to forget when you're at a drama school audition that your chances of being selected hinge as much on your ability to collaborate and work well within a group, as your individual abilities. This is why the further you get in the audition process, the longer...
Performing Shakespeare – No Definitive Rule
The Guardian's 'Secret Actor' column – while entertaining – is sometimes a dispiriting read for someone who wants to enter the profession. This week featured a self-important “Bardmeister” who vaingloriously lectures younger actors in a rehearsal for a Shakespeare...
Acting Is Not Academia
When approaching a part, most actors will say that their definitive starting point is the play itself. As Honeysuckle Weeks stated in an article on Ideastap: “A lot of getting into character is about the rhythm of the speech. Look at the grammar and the syntax of how...
Drama School – The Springboard into the Industry
Financial constraints aside, it's astonishing how many people who want to become actors neither want to train nor go to the theatre, which you would presume are prerequisites to becoming a serious professional. Whether it's down to arrogance or a misplaced belief that...
Performing Shakespeare
It's surprising how often drama school applicants commiserate with each other when they find out that other people are doing the same Shakespeare speeches as them at an audition. The chances of any new material from a man who has been dead for nearly 400 years is...
Drama School – Not Just For Actors
The Times recently dispatched one of its journalists – Richard Morrison - to attend and report back on the increasingly popular intensive courses that RADA offer for people in business. The article was entitled “How RADA helped me find my inner Gordon Gekko”, which...