by Bel | Jul 3, 2014 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, tilly blackwood
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 character’s “emotional arc”. ie. The inner journey or change that the character experiences throughout the speech. The panel aren’t just looking for a change within the speech itself, but also the ability to experiment with a variety of emotional journeys. Versatility and being open to changing the interpretation you entered the audition room with is, in some ways, more important than the performance itself. It demonstrates the knowledge that the text is a catalyst for diverse portrayals and infinite possibilities.
Theatre, with what Kathleen Turner deems its “all consuming eight shows a week” and likens to “being an Olymplic athlete in training”, is where actors can truly explore their range. The live nature of theatre means that no two shows can be exactly the same and why many actors realise they can only be true craftsmen if they are able to act on stage.
Richard Armitage, in this week’s Telegraph spoke of his return to the stage in The Crucible after 13 years of concentrating on film and television as significant: “It’s interesting coming back now and getting into a rehearsal room and going: ‘This is why I did it. I’d forgotten.’ I’m having a really amazing epiphany doing this, and I think I’ll be a different actor when I come out of it.”
This is why drama school panels and Audition Doctor consistently urge candidates to go and see as much theatre as possible. Not only do you often see actors going beyond what you previously thought possible, but you also have to understand what it is that excites you as a member of the audience.
Kathleen Turner claimed: “I definitely go to the theatre more than film, because as much as I enjoy some films, there’s nothing like the participation that you feel sitting in an audience at a live performance. It’s absolutely magic. You sit closer to a complete stranger than you would in your own homeland; if the play is compelling as the actors good, you start to breathe together. You hold your breath together. You laugh together. You can come become something greater than just yourself.”
Audition Doctor sessions are about creating an arresting yet truthful character that makes the audition panel sit up and notice that you are capable of change, and that you are able to honestly be something other than yourself.
by Bel | Jun 12, 2014 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, tilly blackwood
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 courses,” Mr Sinclair said. “There are far more young actors coming out and it feels like there is less work around. There are too many actors and too few jobs.” The Stage reported that a Casting Call Pro survey found that over three quarters of actors earn less than £5,000 a year from the trade they trained for.
As Susan Elkin wrote in The Stage: “It simply wouldn’t be tolerated in other professions… Nobody embarks on medical training, an accountancy degree or business management training in the knowledge that she or he is highly unlikely ever to be able to make a living from it. It simply isn’t how training and work operates in a sensible world.” She advocated institutions becoming even more selective than they already are: ” “I think colleges should be contracting not expanding”. It goes without saying that those who train at accredited drama schools have a far higher chance of successfully making a living as an actor than those who attend newer university drama courses.It’s important to assert that it isn’t the nature of training that is under attack, but the proliferation of newer establishments that purport to offer professional training without accreditation. The importance of picking the right drama school is paramount to ensure durability in the profession and to avoid “effectively being conned by a numbers game”.
When interviewed by Ideastap, Adrian Lester emphasised the importance of training: “Always always always work on your weaknesses. When I left school I didn’t really have a great understanding of Shakespeare and I knew I wanted to be the kind of actor that could handle that. So, I made a conscious effort to work on my weakness which was Shakespeare and the eloquence of emotion that it provided. A few years ago, I turned around and looked at my career so far and realised that I had been regarded as a modern Shakespearean actor.”
With words like “finite”, “saturated” and “competition” routinely used to describe the nature of the industry, vocational training at top drama schools is more important than ever. Audition Doctor’s high success rate is why so many are beginning their training with Tilly.
Lester went onto comment on how “work can get stale if you are doing a long run”. The protracted length between auditions means that students often lose momentum. Audition Doctor sessions dotted regularly between each audition mean that many students have found that their auditions have improved exponentially and consequently, so have their recalls.Lester counselled: “The best way to keep things fresh is to understand why your character is saying what he’s saying. Not just what words you have to say, that’s important but it’s not as important as why they’re saying it. If you understand why…then you can use the words that you speak to try and achieve your objective in slightly different ways every night. No one knows what’s going to happen to them at any given moment, yet actors will say “Well this happens in scene 12 so in scene 10 I have to prepare for it. No you don’t. What happens in scene 12 should be as much of a surprise to you as the audience. Maybe then you’ll surprise yourself.”
Audition Doctor sessions ensure that students go into every audition prepared – not just in terms of understanding the text and their character, but equally in terms of being prepared for the possibility of spontaneous discovery.
by Bel | Jun 5, 2014 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, tilly blackwood
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 made bad mistakes and I talked too much.
The reason why Audition Doctor continues to be in such demand is because the sessions are not merely about performing monologues themselves, but also about avoiding making the bad presentational mistakes that Russell Beale mentions.
Kevin Spacey recently commented on the need for actors to shift their perspective of the audition from something to be conquered to “an opportunity to introduce [themselves] to a group of people. It may not pay off today …but if you have enough confidence and you walk in trusting the material and trusting yourself and not spending time trusting the things that you can’t trust like “Are they going to like me?”, “Are they going to think I’m talented?”, “Do they think I’m handsome?” but controlling the things that you can. [Such as], I’m going to meet you on this day and be the person I am rather than the nervous crazy person who wants the job so badly.”
Trusting the material is something that many auditionees find difficult – especially when it’s Shakespeare. What Audition Doctor sessions do is simple – they demystify the language.As Spacey says: “It’s not difficult. Take the thing that makes Shakespeare scary – the language – but it’s not so difficult. When you approach the plays from a perspective of how people deal with each other, people dig that. It’s just like family. I’ve watched kids of 14 – 15 getting really excited about how relevant the plays can be to their own lives. Don’t put him on a big pedestal – he’s just a playwright – attack him with an excitement about what his plays are about. Don’t dust him off like an antique.”
Audition Doctor sessions focus on the language because the words are the fundamental tools with which to build your character. Spacey opines: “Being an actor is not unlike being a detective, we are given a set of clues; some of them are real, some of them are what other characters say about us, some of them are factual, some of them are red herrings and we have to determine how we play this role based on the clues that we are given, so I spend a lot of time on language.”
Spacey ends his interview with saying “I avoid any judgements about the people I play. It’s my job just to play them.” One of the difficult things about approaching a character is confusing the act of making bold artistic decisions with making unreasonable personal judgements on the character. Audition Doctor ensures that you never do this, but approach both characters and auditions with honesty and confidence.
by Bel | May 29, 2014 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, tilly blackwood
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 initially added colour and variety become stale and choices that were once bold and interesting start to appear mechanical.
Speaking of playing Hamlet in the Independent, Rory Kinnear said how he felt that because the audience knew the play so well, the result was that “a lot of the time Hamlet [seemed] to be playing catch-up with what everybody else already [knew]”. He spoke of hearing people murmuring Hamlet’s lines along with him. However, he also expressed the satisfaction of people commenting: “it was only after a while that they realised that I was doing such-and-such a speech. I suppose it can be surprising to discover these well- known words in the context of the narrative of a play, rather than as verbal set pieces. I suspect that secretly we might believe such great – and famous – outpourings of eloquence and wisdom should be heralded by a pause in the action and a suitable fanfare.”
Theatrical pauses and fanfare are precisely what drama schools are looking to avoid. Audition Doctor sessions offer the space to organically find your own truthful portrayal of oft-performed texts. The result is genuine storytelling which eschews performing your monologue as “a verbal set piece”. Although independent work is an unavoidable requisite, students have found that progress is much quicker with Audition Doctor booster sessions throughout the audition season.
Kinnear acknowledged that if he were to go back “I’m sure that for each role I would want to give a very different performance now. But however I did them, I would still want to focus on those moments when the characters become something they weren’t before. I would want to try to hold on to who they were, with all the weight of their histories, and yet follow them in the successive moments of becoming who they are, as they are faced with those big questions.”
Even Kinnear admits that tackling all this alone and “doing soliloquies to a wall [was]…isolating” and expressed relief when he finally performed it in front of an audience. Audition Doctor is like drama school in that it’s where students receive both professional feedback and direction.
Rarely do candidates get recalls for every single drama school they apply for and it is easy to get disheartened. Audition Doctor sessions mean you avoid the mid-audition slump and continue to achieve noticeable advancements in your development as an actor throughout the audition process.
by Bel | May 22, 2014 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, tilly blackwood
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 hawkish swan that I was at 21.”
It’s reassuring to know that despite rather depressing articles such as The Stage’s “Surely we are training too many students?”, successful actors still support the idea of professional training. The argument against being saddled with substantial debt is routinely employed as justification for eschewing drama school. However, the industry is responding to rising tuition fees with alternatives such as the NYT Rep Company and Cygnet.
Susan Elkin of The Stage wrote: “Cygnet really does seem to be providing fine, informed, very professional and successful training. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and I had an excellent taste last week. Cygnet isn’t Bristol Old Vic or LAMDA and it isn’t trying to be. There is room for a range and I’m all for students having as much choice as possible. There is a lot to be said, for example, for training at over £2,000 per year less than the big schools charge.”
Drama school is the place where risk and the possibility of failure are accepted and even encouraged. It’s where Shaw learned to “think on the line – which means don’t analyse but allow what you’re saying to completely be of you and from you.”
The three years spent focusing on aspects such as movement and voice are also invaluable. On the webchat, someone wrote to Shaw: “I saw you alongside Alan Rickman in ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ in the Abbey in Dublin. I was sitting at the very back row and at one point I literally felt your voice hit me with its power. I couldn’t believe it.” and asked what technique she used to achieve this.
Shaw responded: “If you are concentrated, and your imagination is fully engaged with what you are saying, it is remarkable how quiet you can be, but how you know not only the listener’s ear can hear it, but ideally their mind too. I’ve always been interested in the mutual hypnotism of acting. If the actor’s heart is racing due to a thought, engaged members of the audience’s hearts also race.”
Although this is inevitably achieved through years of experience, the process of communicating and attempting some form of communion with the audience is an essential part of drama school training.
When applying for drama schools, performing monologues is the litmus test for assessing potential. The reason why so many students attend Audition Doctor is because the sessions arm you against the overly introspective effect that monologues can sometimes have.
As Shaw says: “The audience in a monologue are, she says, her fellow characters and fellow performers: “Even if I can’t see them I can hear them, I can sense them, and every moment is being played with rather than for them. It would be dreadful if I just stood there and went blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t feel like that at all. I love talking to them and them back to me. We’re making the play together. Usually there’s a huge dialogue going on.”
Audition Doctor is about truthful communication and the portrayal of genuine emotion. This why so many students find they sail past the monologue stage of auditions and onto group workshops – because they have proven that even when performing alone, they are doing it for an audience and not for themselves.
by Bel | May 15, 2014 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, tilly blackwood
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 lesson in bluffing but more than a little risky.”
The pros and cons of drama school have been endlessly rehashed in various publications. Most come to the conclusion, however reluctantly, that it is still an important stage in an actor’s development.
“Training gives you discipline, a collection of tools and techniques to fall back on, industry contacts, time to develop and the chance to try out different genres, approaches and theories. It is invaluable, if not inexpensive.”
Even actors who have been successful without the help of training acknowledge the benefits of drama school.
Russell Tovey mentioned: “I feel like I’ve missed out on the fact that I haven’t got loads of mates from drama school in the business, but it was all kind of kicking off for me around that time. If I hadn’t been in work I would have absolutely done drama school. I feel like it’s the route to doing it properly and so I’m absolutely all for it.”
Ideastap were running a competition with Sky Arts that granted emerging artists £30,000 worth of funding. When asked what he would do with the money, he said: “I’d spend it on the year post-grad at LAMDA because courses are expensive, so I would use it to further my education and knowledge.” What’s clear is that the quality of education offered at drama schools is not being questioned, merely the price tag.
While Audition Doctor is known for getting applicants recalls for drama schools, sessions are also an excellent preparation for drama school itself.
In Ideastap, advice was given to those about to start training. “Keep an open mind about what you’re going into. Jane Harrison, Interim Dean and Head of Acting at Arts Ed, acknowledges that although many students may have studied acting to a high level in the past it’s vital they “accept that they’re going to what may be a new way of working and not feel that the way they did it before was right. There is no right or wrong in actor training so the best thing is to come completely open-minded. A willingness to embrace new ideas is particularly important in terms of a student’s interactions with others on the course.
At Audition Doctor, you will inevitably experience a varied way of working and any student at Audition Doctor will tell you that the prevailing tone of a session is positivity. It’s why beginning your training at Audition Doctor is worth every penny.
by Bel | May 8, 2014 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, tilly blackwood
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 various forks in the road ahead, examining them thoroughly, and then making a decision. There wasn’t necessarily a right decision – especially, as I discovered to my delight, with Shakespeare – but there had to be a decision.”
Decisions are why people come to Audition Doctor. Unless you are auditioning for new writing, chances are that countless actors will have tackled your part before. For those auditioning for drama school, many find the thought of entering the audition room as the fifth Cressida horrifying. However, it is comforting to read Kinnear’s assertion that “Shakespeare gives his actors quite a lot of open-endedness within which to work: you’re not often given much back-story, and you’re certainly never guided by him to any particular decision. You have to make your own.”
The open-endedness that he talks about is what Audition Doctor sessions focus on. The freedom that Shakespeare affords the actor means that there are endless choices that can be made to make sure that the character you present is wholly different from the one that the next actor performs after you. Kinnear mentioned that he approached parts “initially just by thinking about them, and then afterwards [trying] to figure out what works well in the doing.”
Thinking – you can do on your own. However, the reason why Audition Doctor is so popular is because the “doing” is nigh-on impossible to achieve repeatedly by yourself. Kinnear, speaking of his experience of Hamlet, said “What surprised me most with Hamlet was that, having gone through that rehearsal process, it wasn’t until the first time I performed it in front of an audience that I realised that it’s only in relation to that body of witnesses that Hamlet discovers himself. If you’re rehearsing in a white room, doing those soliloquies to a wall, even though it’s quite self-reflective and leads to a number of important insights, you’re not really getting anything back.” The feedback you get from Tilly is not only helpful artistically, but also crucial in simply understanding how to respond intelligently to direction.
On Newsnight last week, actors such as Simon Callow, Harriet Walter and Helen Mirren spoke of their experience of Shakespeare. Walter said: “I came to Shakespeare late, I was very frightened of him because I thought there was a way to do it and I was told I had a rubbish voice at drama school…Once you stop being frightened of him, once you stop thinking its high-brow, once you let him in, go with it and not worry if you don’t understand every word, it becomes electric.
Above all, Audition Doctor sessions demystify Shakespeare and there is never a prescriptive way of approaching the text. After a certain number of sessions, there comes a point when the language ceases to be unwieldy and it becomes to feel natural to speak in blank verse. The speech is no longer stilted and you begin to inhabit a character that, despite being Shakespearean, is wholly present – in both senses of the word. It’s why students keep coming back.
by Bel | May 1, 2014 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, tilly blackwood
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 drama school interviews and many understandably spend time crafting the “perfect” answer to impress the panel. However, it is perhaps the private and unpolished response that will clarify the kind of actor you want to be.
Mark Rylance mentioned that the thing that sustained him as an artist was secrets – “things that are forbidden to be said. Maybe people are frightened of something, maybe they don’t have the words to express it, but those are the things that need to be said by theatre. That’s what it’s here for. Look for those secrets in society and inside yourself and give them a voice. That’s the role of an artist in our society.”
He went onto say: “Going to the theatre should be like going on holiday. It should allow you to experience a little piece of someone else’s life for a while. If it’s really good, when it’s over you should be able to look at your own life and see it with fresh eyes for a while.”
Sessions with Audition Doctor are all about unearthing bits of the text and discovering the unspoken. The result is that although there may be 30 other people doing the same Shakespeare speech as you on the day of the audition, your performance will be both unique and adventurous.
Many students come to Audition Doctor to start again. This can be because they aren’t getting any recalls, because they find their speeches are no longer being performed as if for the first time or because their interpretation seems to be formed from a mishmash of other actors’ performances.
It’s reassuring to know that even Simon Russell Beale admitted that the most difficult thing when starting a new play was “getting rid of my preconceptions. Harder than you might imagine. If somehow I can start from scratch, then there have been many occasions when I have discovered things that I never expected to. The second thing is trying to achieve absolutely clarity of thought. Before that’s done the emotional life of any character is a bit of a mystery for me.”
Clarity of thought is something that Audition Doctor emphasises in lessons. This is because an audience (and especially an audition panel at drama school) will be able to hear if you don’t understand the text you are speaking. Inevitably, as soon as this happens, the audience’s suspension of disbelief is dispelled and the illusion is broken. Moreover, you fail to hear what Shelley Winters described as “the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve hit them where they live”.
by Bel | Apr 24, 2014 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, tilly blackwood
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 Shakespeare coined centuries ago are still in common usage and the fact that his birthday celebrations are being put ahead of festivities for St George’s day. There is no doubt that there is still an appetite for his plays to be performed.
However, Dominic Cavendish – the Telegraph’s theatre critic – conceded: Is this week not as good as any to admit just how intellectually challenging much that lies in the complete works can be and how borderline incomprehensible his language can get, both in terms of the now archaic and obscure nature of his references and the complexity of his poetic expression?”
Amongst all the interactive Bard games and video uploads of people reciting their favourite Shakespeare quotations, there have also been admissions from leading figures in theatre over the inaccessibility of the language. Cavendish’s article was entitled “Admit it – most of us don’t understand Shakespeare”.
Nick Hytner’s confession last autumn has also been reprinted: “I cannot be alone in finding that almost invariably in performance there are passages that fly straight over my head. In fact, I’ll admit that I hardly ever go to a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays without experiencing blind panic during the first five minutes. I sit there thinking: I’m the director of the National Theatre, and I have no idea what these people are talking about.”
Even actor Ethan Hawke, who was in The Winter’s Tale at the Old Vic, said: “I can’t even read the plays, I know some people can but I literally have a tape of the production of the play and read it while I [watch] it.”
There has been a renewed determination to make Shakespeare productions even more accessible. There is a push to ensure productions communicate energy, emotion, the vital essence of the work, and do its utmost to be as lucid as possible for the modern ear.” This, of course, is down to the actor.
As Audition Doctor stresses, if you don’t understand the language, the audience won’t either. Hawke’s admission is reassuring as that it doesn’t make you less of an actor not fully understanding the language and having to discover the language. It’s in sessions such as at Audition Doctor that the text can be unpicked and pored over.
As Hawke said: “I love breaking down the text and figuring out what the words mean.There’s a great joy that comes from at one point not knowing what a series of sentences mean and then later being able to get a laugh on it. Not only do you know what it means but you can actually translate it to a thousand people…That comes from building the character and inhabiting the circumstances with such commitment and force.”
Audition Doctor is about the exploring as well as the resultant performance. The satisfaction that comes at the end of every lesson is why students return time and time again.
Ethan Hawke went onto admit that while writing was the most peaceful part of making theatre, “there is a tremendous amount of anxiety and stress that comes along with performing…I feel like I’ve spent a great bulk of my life at war with my nervous system.”
Audition Doctor sessions are all about preparation which greatly reduces the stress that comes hand in hand with an audition. As Hawke said: “Shakespeare becomes so alive in the doing.” The “doing” at Audition Doctor ensures that you “live” the character honestly, thereby giving a truthful performance.
by Bel | Apr 17, 2014 | acting classes, acting classes london, audition classes, audition doctor, auditions, classes for acting, tilly blackwood
When auditioning for drama school, performing the work of long dead playwrights is unavoidable. Most, if not all, accredited drama schools require applicants to perform one (or even two) Shakespeare or Elizabethan-era monologues. Even with the assistance of a No Fear Shakespeare edition of the play, the language can be frustrating and impenetrable.
When Simon Russell Beale was interviewed about how he approached Shakespeare texts, he said: “I go through the text with a fine tooth comb. With complicated verse, I have to make it comprehensible at first hearing. That seems to be my basic job so a lot of the early work is about that, it’s about getting the series of thoughts absolutely clear. That’s actually easier said than done. It’s quite complicated when you dig into these plays and have to work out what this person is thinking…The emotional life comes later, that’s something that builds in rehearsal with reaction to other people but the process that you work on yourself is working out the sequence of thoughts.”
Most drama school applicants have neither Russell Beale’s extensive experience nor his first class degree in English literature, so working out the sequence of thoughts articulated in sixteenth century English will be daunting. Audition Doctor is the place to unpick the language, as well as discover the emotional journey that your character takes. The sessions are mini rehearsals where you can truly have the freedom to play.
The most successful of Audition Doctor’s students tend to be those who come prepared with different speeches with various ideas of how to approach them. They are the ones who regularly go to the theatre and who don’t settle for obvious and unimaginative choices.
Jeff Goldblum stated about aspiring young actors: “Don’t do it unless it’s a wild-hearted passion for you and you can’t possibly to anything else and I’ve got to play that game again and…when you can’t wake up without thinking I’ve got to play that game again where I’ve got to play pretend.”
The students that get further in the recall stages are those who come to Tilly with a readiness to experiment coupled with intelligent textual observations. They are the ones who practice what Niamh Cusack advised in Ideastap: “If you see a play and there is a particularly good speech in it, then get the play and learn the speech. Practice is what makes you a good actor. The more you’re prepared – learn speeches, try them out – then the easier it will be for you to walk in and do a good audition. Thinking you’ll get that big break without that hard work is a bit crazy. I don’t think there are that many geniuses; most people have worked really, really hard.”
Further on in his interview, Goldblum said that the best actors were those who were child-like in their ability to play, those who had the vulnerability to be susceptible to their imaginations. It is this quality that Tilly encourages and why Audition Doctor is continually in demand.
