At Audition Doctor, Tilly always encourages students to spend a considerable amount of time in search of the speech that they would like to work on.
David Haig recently was interviewed in Whatsonstage playing King George III: “It’s incredibly rare to find a role that you feel is in your blood stream. When I did George III, I felt that it fitted like a glove and that I could really express what I wanted to as an actor,” he explains. “I put so much of myself in it and it seemed to work well and therefore it came together chemically, I don’t think I’ll ever meet a part like that again or will feel the same about acting again,” he says. “So I have a slightly different attitude to acting than I did three years ago because of that.”
Picking the right role is paramount as students find that certain parts allow them to access a vulnerability or progress through an emotional trajectory that showcases their abilities to the utmost.
While most of Audition Doctor’s students are professional actors and those applying to drama school, some are untrained actors seeking informal training sessions.
Dee Cannon, who taught at RADA, wrote an article in The Guardian about building characters and the acting industry as a whole:
“Actors may believe that they can do without formal training…Natural ability will get you so far, but it’s the trained actors who know what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and can produce that emotion take after take. Talent may be enough to get by on screen and TV, but with a few notable exceptions such as Kelly Reilly, the untrained actor often fares badly on stage. The performances that most often thrill us are those where instinct and technique are both in perfect balance but also opposition, and flamboyance and inner life collide head on, transforming feeling into thought and words. When this mixture of abandon and control ignites, what happens is as mysterious as alchemy; the theatre crackles; it leaves the spectator reeling.”
While Audition Doctor provides help to many actors, Tilly always encourages those who have not formally trained to do so. Audition Doctor sessions give students a helpful taster of the kind of work they will be doing at drama school.
Cannon went onto say: “To fully transform into a character, to be truthfully and emotionally connected needs hard work, technique, good direction. But the audience should see none of this. They should see nothing other than the fully realised three-dimensional character right in the truth of the moment.”
Audition Doctor is unique in that Tilly offers the space and guidance to help students realise this. The blending of instinct, technique and emotional perspicacity that students come to master is something that comes out of the sessions and why students never fail to recommend Audition Doctor highly enough.
