Caldarone - Classical Monologues for Women

The Good Audition Guides

CLASSICAL MONOLOGUES FOR WOMEN

edited and introduced by

MARINA CALDARONE

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

from Thebans by Liz Lochhead (2003),
after Sophocles and Euripides (5th century BC )

from The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William
Shakespeare (1593)

from The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
(1595)

from A Mad World, My Masters
by Thomas Middleton (1605)

from The Changeling
by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley (1622)

from A New Way to Pay Old Debts
by Philip Massinger (1625)

from The Clandestine Marriage
by David Garrick/George Coleman (1766)

from Fashion, or Life in New York
by Anna Cora Mowatt (1845)

from Alans Wife
by Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robins (1893)

from The Dance of Death, Part Two
by August Strindberg (1901)

Introduction

AN OPPORTUNITY, NOT A TEST

Lets assume you have an audition coming up. It may be for entrance to drama school, or for your first job after training, or it could be twenty years into your career and you have been asked to show your suitability for a specific role. Whatever the circumstances, the stakes are always high, and the somewhat artificial situation is undeniably nerve-racking. You want to find a monologue that does two jobs at once: it suits your particular skills and it demonstrates your particular suitability for the job you are interviewing for.

Before you begin, it is worth remembering that the person or panel auditioning you is just as anxious... for you. They will want to put you at your ease, get the very best out of you, and enable you to enjoy the experience so that they do as well. Adrenaline can be a useful energising factor, but the most valuable qualities when going into an audition are sound prepa ration and an ability to flex that most crucial of actors muscles: the imagination. Dare to make brave choices in the selection and delivery of your audition piece, and you will always stand out. View your audition as an opportunity, not a test.

USING THIS BOOK

The fifty speeches in this volume offer a new selection of classical monologues, divided into five distinct time periods from Ancient Greece to the 1930s. It is not an anthology of great speeches from dramatic literature but, rather, a miscellany of eclectic and original monologues. Many will prove challenging; some will seem immediately unsuitable for you; others will lead you down stimulating new avenues you hadnt considered before. Most of the monologues are taken in their entirety from plays; others have been shaped and moulded from a series of separate but closely connected passages to form a coherent speech.

The monologues are arranged in chronological order, within the five time periods: Classical Greek and Roman, Elizabethan and Jacobean, French and Spanish Golden Age, Restoration and Eighteenth Century, and Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Before each section is a short introduction to the respective period, plus some pointers that may prove interesting or useful. By and large, however, the same rules for preparing your monologue apply for all time periods whether you are delivering Ancient Greek rhetoric, Renaissance tragic verse or savage Wildean wit.

Preceding each individual monologue is a checklist of the basic information you need to know before you can begin work: Who is speaking; Where; To whom and When the character is speaking; What has just happened in the play to provoke the speech; What the character wants and some possible objectives to play. After many of the speeches is a glossary explaining less familiar words and phrases.

This checklist isnt a substitute for reading the play from which the monologue is taken. Nor is it offered as a comprehensive guide or direction on how to rehearse and present the speech. Its a starting point, a springboard, from which you need to start making your own choices, in order to achieve ownership of the monologue and your performance of it.

The important thing is to keep your performance real and truthful. Many people put too much emphasis on the notion of classical text being very different and very much harder than contemporary text. Yes, classical text is harder insofar as the language can be less familiar, the syntax trickier, the form less comfortable but the heart of the work is exactly the same, albeit sometimes bigger. During the act of transformation, you will need to grow emotionally, linguistically, physically in order to speak these lines; the character remains a person inhabiting a real world not a classical one frozen in the past!

CHOOSING YOUR MONOLOGUE

There are many books written on how to audition, numerous classes to take in perfecting your audition technique, and it can be easy to forget that the first, and possibly the most important, stage in the process is making your initial choice of audition material.

PREPARING YOUR MONOLOGUE

So youve chosen your speech and now need to prepare it for your audition. Here are some of the things you certainly should be doing, some things you might be considering, and some you should definitely be avoiding.