Length

The chances are that there will be a lot of competition when you turn up for your audition. Open casting calls can often take place over a number of days and hundreds of desperate hopefuls will pass through the audition room doors. As such you will normally be asked to perform one or two monologues that are no longer than three minutes, in some cases no more than two minutes. The best approach is almost always to have a speech prepared that is at least 3 minutes long. It is far more common for an audition panel to ask you to stop because they have seen enough to make a decision than it is for them to ask you to stop because you have hit the time limit. The best approach is to aim to be up and performing in front of the panel for as long as possible.

Choosing a speech that is the right length can be trickier than it sounds. Many directors will tell you that as a rough guide, one page of text will normally equal 1 minute on stage. But this can be misleading as the performance time of a monologue will depend on the required pace of the piece. For example Harold Pinter was famous for writing plays whose text is full of long silences. The so called “Pinter Pause” or “Pinter Silence” is a well explored dramatic technique that you can read more about here. Texts that employ such dramatic devices will naturally take longer to perform than a straight text.

The best way to get to grips with how long it will take you to perform a speech is to read it out loud, making sure that you observe any stage directions that you are given and time how long it takes. This should give you a good feel for the length of the piece, but do keep in mind that once you have fully prepared your audition speech it will almost certainly take at least 20 -30 seconds longer to perform than it took to read.

Occasionally you will come across an audition speech that is perfect for you but is just far too long, if you find yourself in this situation resist the urge to do a little DIY editing. This is particularly true if the speech is well known, as a change in the text will probably confuse (or worse irritate) the audition panel.

A better approach is to choose an excerpt from the speech. Typically auditionees will choose an excerpt from the end of a monologue as this is usually the most dramatic moment in the speech. While this is often the case it is worth remembering that in some instances the panel may chose to cut your audition short, so if you do choose and excerpt, make sure that the point at which you enter the text is interesting enough to hold the panels attention.

Set

The now word famous Musical Les Misérables has one of the most imaginative and complex stage designs ever constructed. An enormous central turntable allows the audience to follow the on stage action as the characters walk the streets of Paris and at one point the entire stage turns through 360 degrees and transforms into a barricade from which a climactic battle takes place.

While this makes for an amazing Broadway or West End spectacle, it highly unlikely the audition room that you walk in to will have much more than a few chairs and a table for you to work with. In some cases there will be nothing at all for you to work with. However this does not mean that you should give up on your hopes of performing your favourite speech simply because it is set on the moon.  As an actor it is your job to make your audience suspend their disbelief and be transported the world in which your speech is set.

As you can never really know what will be provided for you to work with on the day, you should prepare your speech in a number of different ways. For example, if the scene calls for you to be sat in a restaurant, ensure that you have rehearsed your speech both seated at a table and standing without a table. Remember, an audition can be stressful enough without having to deal with curve balls so choose a speech that doesn’t rely on the set and be prepared to be flexible in how you perform it.

Props

The Classic play Ajax by Sophocles, tells the tale of the Greek warrior Ajax, who having been overlooked by his commanding officers for a prestigious reward and having been tricked by a god, decides to take his own life by throwing himself on to a sword that he has buried up to its hilt in the ground.

There are a number of wonderful and beautifully written speeches in this play that would be worthy of any audition room. However there is one slight snag, the majority of the speeches require our hero to be on his knees and leaning against his sword. This poses something of a problem for the audition room as not only is it dangerous to perch yourself on top of a sword for three minutes, it is also impractical (not to mention illegal) to consider carrying a sword from audition to audition.

Now you might think that I’m being a little picky here as it is perfectly possible for you to perform the piece without the sword and simply kneel on the ground. However in this particular case the sword is integral to the piece as not only is it repeatedly referenced in the text, much of the dramatic tension in the play comes from the fact that we are constantly waiting for the moment when Ajax finally hurls himself on to the blade. This sort of tension is difficult to reproduce when you are simply pretending that there is a sword in front of you and worse still, if the audition panel isn’t familiar with script then they might not realise that there is supposed to be a sword there at all. This could prove to be particularly confusing when the moment of Ajax’s demise finally comes.

When it comes to props you should aim to find a speech that isn’t written around a central object that is integral to performance of the piece. Of course it is almost impossible to find a speech that doesn’t require a prop of some description; if the speech you have chosen requires the use of a prop then be prepared to either mime the prop or leave it out entirely. However if the prop is something simple, like a pen or a cigarette then you should feel free to take one in to the audition room with you (although I wouldn’t recommend actually lighting the cigarette.)

Costume

In almost all cases you should NOT consider wearing a costume to your audition.  Costumes can often be cumbersome, uncomfortable, itchy and generally just awkward. The last thing you need at your big audition is to be burdened with a whale bone corset or a powdered wig.

More importantly a good costume will be expensive and as an out of work actor you can’t really afford to be spending money on a costume that you may only wear once.

However you should not let the fact that a play is set in Victorian England put you off choosing a particular speech.

When it comes to auditions, there are a number of important factors to consider when choosing what outfit to wear. I will cover these considerations in a later post that will be linked to here when it’s available.

Scripts not to use

• TV and Film

There are no written rules that stipulate that you shouldn’t choose a speech from a film rather than a play. But whether you like it or not the use of speeches from films is often frowned upon in an audition. There is no really good reason for this other than the fact that many of the best speeches from film and television are associated with iconic actors that can be difficult to live up to. Regardless of how much you might love that speech from Braveheart, you are never going to give a performance that will make people forget about Mel Gibson’s rendition. Remember your performance should raise eyebrows for all the right reasons.

• Unpublished Works

While the play you wrote in your spare time might be one of the greatest unpublished works of the 21^st century, you aren’t going to do yourself any favours by performing excerpts from it in the audition room. The same goes for any other unpublished works that you might have access to.

Specific Instructions

When it comes to auditions the people sat behind the table rule the universe (or so they like to think). Your fate and that of hundreds of other hopefuls is in their hands so it’s probably a good idea to follow any specific instructions that they might give.

For example if you are auditioning for a drama school, they will probably ask you to prepare two speeches, one in blank verse (such as Shakespeare) and one in ordinary prose, or they might ask you to perform a classical piece followed by a contemporary piece.

In some cases you will be given a list of speeches that should not be performed.  These lists serve two purposes:

1. To save the audition panel from seeing the same old speeches performed time after time.
2. To stop you from making an idiot out of yourself by performing the same old speech that the audition panel has sat through time after time.

Any specific instructions will normally be given to you well in advance of the audition so that you have plenty of time to prepare, make sure that you read them and follow them to the letter!

Choose Contrasting Speeches

Having run the audition speech gauntlet you will no doubt be over the moon to hear that you are going to have to do it all over again.

That’s right, you need to have at least two audition speeches up your sleeves but in my opinion it’s a better idea to have at least four, that way you can be sure that you have covered all the bases in terms of style and content and have more than one alternative ready should you need one.

Make sure when you are choosing a speeches to pick something that contrasts with the pieces that you already have and allows you to demonstrate your dramatic range. This doesn’t mean that you should pick one quiet piece and one loud piece rather that you should look for pieces that contrast in terms of writing style or genre, or charachters who exist at opposit ends od the dramaic spectrum.

One good approach is to find two contrasting Shakespearian pieces (or pieces in blank verse) and two contrasting contemporary pieces.

Casting

Producers love nothing more than to take a well established classic and mix things up a bit. Take Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for example; over the years there have been literally thousands of interpretations of this famous tragedy, with the principle characters being played by actors representing almost every section of society. While this is fine for the big screen or on Broadway, it is rarely a good strategy to adopt the same approach when choosing your audition speech. There is one simple rule when it comes to casting yourself into a part: Play to your strengths!

This might seem like an obvious statement but you would be amazed by the number of auditions I’ve sat through were the auditionee has insisted on performing a piece that requires an accent that they just can’t do.

So here are a few points for you to consider when choosing a part to play.

Accents

We all know how distracting it can be when one of the principle actors in a movie garbles their way through an accent. Well that’s exactly the reaction that a casting director or producer is going to have if you do the same thing in an audition.

Here is Golden Globe nominee, Demi Moore proving my point.

Accents can be learned and there are a number of very good voice coaches that can help you to get to grips with any number of dialects, but keep in mind that you might spend a lot of time, money and effort learning to speak with an authentic French accent, only for the part to be given to a French actor.

Like rolling your tongue, accents are one of those things that you can either do or you can’t. When looking for an audition speech, it is usually a good idea to pick characters whose accent you share or whose accent is not specified in the script.

However in the dog eat dog world of the modern actor / actress it will be necessary for you to audition for parts that will require an accent that you may not be familiar with. In many circumstances you will be given a section of the production script to work with and there will be no need for you to perform your audition speech. If the required accent is not one that you are confident with then the best approach is to perform the piece in a soft version of the required accent; this is far from ideal but auditions can be hard enough without having to produce the perfect Texan accent to boot.

One last point on accents; Shakespeare is often performed using what is known as Received Pronunciation, while this is a useful accent for an actor to learn, there really is no reason why you shouldn’t perform Shakespeare in your own accent. For more information here’s an interesting blog post from the good people at The Bard Blog.

Sex

This might seem like an obvious point, but it is usually a good idea to cast yourself in a roll of the same sex. This is particularly true if the piece you have chosen is well known. As I mentioned at the top of this post, an audition is not the best platform from which to start experimenting and pushing the boundaries of social norms, and while no one in their right mind would have a problem with a women playing Hamlet or a man playing Ophelia, your audition should be memorable for the quality of your performance and not for its quirks.

Age Group

The classic one woman play Shirley Valentine by Willie Russell, depicts a middle aged woman who rediscovers herself on a holiday to Greece. Sections from this wonderful script have been performed countless times in audition rooms right around the world, which is hardly surprising when you consider how wonderfully well written the play is. However, the vast majority of auditionees that I have seen perform speeches from this play have been far from middle aged.

This might seem like an overly pedantic point on my part, but the truth is that the power of Willie Russell’s play comes from watching a tired, world weary, middle aged woman transform herself in to a strong, smart and independent woman. This is something that a younger actress just can’t reproduce in the same way that an older actress can. No matter how well you do on the day if you just don’t look the part then the person you are auditioning for is going to find it hard to believe your performance.

There are no hard and fast rules as to what age range an actor can play, the best advice I could give you is to be honest with yourself about what age group you could comfortably get away with. Remember your audition should be memorable for the quality of your performance and not for its quirks.