Blowing Away Some Cobwebs (With a Box of Matches and a Stick of Dynamite)

Blowing Away Some Cobwebs (With a Box of Matches and a Stick of Dynamite): Whoa.

Is… Is this a… a blog of some sort?

Like… you know, one of those things that I’m supposed to write entries for on a semi-regular basis or something?

Nah, I haven’t written anything on it for ages, it can’t be…

Ok, so I’m sorry. I apologise. I’ve been very, very bad with updates recently. As in, there haven’t been any. Oops.

I’ve been a bit preoccupied with various different things that I will explain in a moment – but also, this is really a blog about drama school auditions, and so the summer was kinda difficult to write anything about, because, you know, there weren’t any auditions happening…

BUT IT’S OK!!! DON’T KILL YOUR PETS/COLLEAGUES/LOVED ONES JUST YET!!! I’M BACK AND I’M WRITING ANOTHER POST AND IT’S ALL GONNA BE OK, OK?!?!?!?!?

…

Right. So what’s been going on? Well, as you might recall from my last post, I was in the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony in July, which was AWESOME, partly due to the fact that I managed to pinpoint myself on the iPlayer repeat and realised that at one point I’d been standing about two metres away from Kenneth Branagh without even realising it (though only I could tell that it was me – they obviously wouldn’t want anybody watching the live broadcast to actually see my face, would they…). But yes, that was brilliant, and after a spending a LOT of hours during rehearsals standing around eating Pringles in the rain (such is the nature of these big arena shows, it seems), it was all worth it in the end when I saw 80,000 people in that stadium looking down on us, cheering and applauding, which was one of the best feelings of my entire life.

Now, as you might also recall from my last post (though it has been a while, so I don’t blame you if you don’t…) I’m currently touring round primary schools in Scotland performing as Bilbo Baggins in a 50-minute, 4-man version of The Hobbit, complete with life-size puppet dragon. As I write this, I am sitting in a slightly gloomy Scottish B&B, ready to go to bed as I prepare for another week of getting up at 6am every day to drive round various different parts of Scotland, ready to assemble the set for, perform in, and strike our show, two or three times per day, in-between eating baked bean sandwiches whilst sitting on the slightly mouldy back seat of our minibus as we navigate the hostile Scottish elements en route to our next audience of underwhelmed nine-year-old kids.

Or not.

I didn’t get cold feet. Honest. It was more a case of… warm… hands…

No, that doesn’t sound quite right…

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do the job (though I must admit, early mornings never really did agree with me) – it’s just, I found something… well… a little bit better.

By chance, I was on the Globe Theatre website, looking for a job as an usher, when I stumbled across a section entitled “Jobs and Opportunities”; tucked away there, I found the application form for a year-long paid internship in the Education Department of the Globe, helping to run their ‘Lively Action’ Programme (when kids of all different ages from schools around the world visit the Globe to take part in various tours and workshops).

A year’s not-too-soul-destroyingly-badly-paid employment at a world-famous theatre on the beautiful South Bank, with all those theatre-y people swanning about the place all day long… What a great way to fill my unexpected second gap year (and a great thing to say I’d been doing in my drama school interviews!). And so, with the knowledge that when the primary schools tour finished I would yet again be at a loose end afterwards nagging away at the back of my mind (plus the thought of those 6am starts…), I applied.

One lengthy application form and two even lengthier interviews later, and I received a phone call telling me that I’d got the job and that I’d be starting on 20^th August.

I’ve been told that my sigh of relief was heard by Maori tribespeople in New Zealand.

So, taking the coward’s way out and choosing to email my unsuspecting primary schools tours employer instead of phoning them (though I did give them about a month’s notice, which is pretty reasonable in my opinion), I found myself looking forward to another year in London and another year of auditions (oh, joy!...).

And so, that just about brings us up to about where we are now. But just to fill in the cracks of what I’ve been doing during my unforgivable absence, here are a few other bits and bobs that have been keeping me occupied:

·       A fabulous trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August (keywords: sunshine, laughs, alcohol – and a little bit of theatre…)

·       A rain-swept family holiday in Cornwall (in which a bodyboarding incident could have cost me my face, but instead just cost me my dignity)

·       The commencement of a guitarist/singer partnership with a friend of mine

·       Visits to the gym along with a fairly regimented eating regime to get in shape for drama school auditions (I felt like putting my mind to something like this would mentally strengthen me up a bit for the auditions – and hopefully give me a bit more of a physical presence, too!)

·       And last but most certainly not least, obligatory drunken evenings with my friends at the pub as they all head off back to university, to leave me, once again, alone, reclusive, and friendless (ok – partly joking there…)

So there you have it. I’m here. I’m back.

And I’ll be trying to keep up posting here a bit more regularly than I have been (if I can’t beat once in five months then that’s a pretty poor effort!). Until then, you will probably find me fending off angry German teachers (there seem to be a lot of them) in the main foyer of the Globe Theatre as I try to explain to them that they unfortunately can’t actually meet Shakespeare today, because he’s a bit busy/dead.

Alternatively, you might see me painstakingly, soul-destroyingly trawling through quite literally tonnes of plays in the National Theatre Bookshop as I try to find a modern monologue that I actually like, to use for my auditions. I think the staff there recognise me now. Hell, I probably see more of them than my family, the way I’m going at the moment…

Anyway, thanks for reading; I’ll let you know how I’m getting on with everything soon enough, don’t worry. And lastly, to the four people that checked this blog today, even though I hadn’t posted anything for almost half a year – I salute you!

P.S. In the first draft of this, the bullet point section went really weird... I've fixed it now but yeah, if you were wondering what all those random characters were, sorry about that - it wasn't me just smashing my forehead on the keyboard, I swear!...

A Change in the Weather

A Change in the Weather: Ok it’s been exactly a month. I really didn’t plan to take so long before writing another post, but, hey, things happen.

Ok, here goes (and excuse me if I’m a little rusty – as I’ve said, it’s been a while)…

*Deep breath*

So I won’t be going to drama school in September.

*Dramatic pause*

But I won’t be going to university either.

…

*Awkward pause while you digest the information and question my sanity*

…

But WAIT! Wait, please, hear me out…

Look, I think I’m going to have to break this down into random-and-not-necessarily-chronological chunks so that I can get my head around it all. I’ll start with my GSA audition on the 28^th April, though I’m not going to go through the whole thing from start to finish on here because a) this post is probably gonna be pretty long as it is, b) it was a little while ago now so the details might be a little hazy, and c) I didn’t get a recall there so screw them.

Ok maybe not that last one, but yeah really I’m not going to go through it all in too much detail because I really can’t see myself ever setting foot in GSA again. I’m sorry to have to say that, but there was just something about the place that I just didn’t like. It’s really difficult to put a finger on exactly but I think I just found the whole place a little bit patronising, and thought it tried too hard to be different (oh how that word makes me shudder…).

I really promise you that I’m not just saying this because I’m bitter (as you’ll see later when I talk about LAMDA, just because I get rejected from somewhere doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t like the place). I did actually, genuinely, really want to like GSA. It was my last audition. I wanted to feel at home there, to fall in love with it, to find my perfect drama school match blah blah blah (this is sounding like a dating blog). But I just couldn’t. So here I’ll sum up some of what happened. Be warned: the following may contain excessive moaning – but I hope that by the end of this post that will have changed.

I’ll quickly tell you about my monologues before I explain in a bit more detail about what I meant by the “patronising/trying to be different” stuff. Actually, I won’t tell you about my monologues, I’ll tell you about my monologue, because, weirdly, we were only asked for one of them. ONE?!? The other was supposed to be saved for the afternoon (though of course I never reached that stage), which I found pretty weird, but anyway… It was fine. I picked my modern piece because I think it’s a more well-rounded monologue than the Shakespeare, and I thought I did it pretty well (it was probably about my third best rendition of it out of the five schools that I performed it at), though unfortunately a boy who went only a few minutes before me, who actually looked a little bit like me, did another monologue that was very similar to mine which got a lot of laughs and had me gnashing my teeth in annoyance (inevitably, he got a recall…). But anyway, mine went fine. It was good, even. Not brilliant, but in my humble opinion it was certainly no worse than the monologue that the other boy had given a few minutes earlier.

Though not according to the panel.

*Sigh*

Anyway, back to what I was saying earlier; I’ll start with the acting workshop: I found the exercise in which we had to describe the view from our bedroom window patronising – not because it was a childish exercise or something like that, because I think that sort of thing can be a good way of judging people’s imagination/storytelling ability, but because they didn’t tell us anything at any stage about what they were looking for. I have been investigating the idea of drama school since about October 2009 – I know how difficult it is to get in. I know that all the schools look for slightly different things. I really can’t stand it when the schools pretend that it isn’t a competition; that we aren’t all desperate to know what it is that they want to see, so that we could try to provide it. They seem to think that by telling us what they were looking for, they would somehow be “sullying” the integrity of the audition process, or something like that. The lady running the workshop told us to “visualise the view from our bedroom window, and describe it”. Now I’m no genius, really, but I assumed that the sort of thing that they might like to hear would be a vivid, detailed vision of what I can see out of my bedroom window, filled in with colourful little details and personal touches, as if I can really see it all in front of my eyes and am really living in the moment of being in my bedroom looking out of the window. Made sense to me, anyway.

But apparently that’s not right – or at least, it can’t be, surely, or I might have got a recall? Because I know I gave a detailed, colourful, personalised description of what it’s like for me to look out of my bedroom window. I would have much preferred the lady to have said to us, “describe the view from your bedroom window, trying really hard to make it sound like a cartoon image”, or even, “describe the view from your bedroom window as if you were an alien from another planet who had never seen anything on Earth before”, because to me, those things require imagination, storytelling and characterisation. They have a clear goal. But what on earth is the goal for “describe the view from your bedroom window” supposed to be? It could be anything! If it was a test of who could give the most vivid description, then I could understand that, though clearly it wasn’t, as I know I gave a very vivid description and didn’t get a recall. I am trying to remember the descriptions given by those who later were given recalls, but I can’t bring to mind with any sort of clarity what exactly was different about those descriptions in comparison to everyone else’s (and yes, I know this exercise wasn’t the only thing we were judged on with regard to getting recalled or not but it certainly played a part). In fact, I don’t remember there being that much difference between anybody’s descriptions at all, to be honest.

Maybe they just wanted to check which candidates had the biggest back gardens as part of their “equal opportunities” policy or something…

If I were running a drama school, I would sit everybody down at the start of the audition and explain meticulously to everyone what type of drama school this was, what sort of methods of working we used, and what sort of attitude we liked to see in our applicants. And before each exercise, I would explain if there was anything in particular that we were looking for in the candidates and if there was anything which should be avoided (and this isn’t so people could bluff their way to success, it’s so that honest people like me could do the best they are capable of doing in that situation, and not accidentally do the wrong thing when they are perfectly capable of doing it much better).

I would love to be told what I need to do, even if it is far removed from what I personally like to do, as long as there is a clear goal – something to focus on. Because to me, an adaptable actor is a good actor. After all, acting is all about adapting yourself, changing, channelling your experiences in a way that they wouldn’t normally be channelled at that moment in your own life, right? It is to me, anyway. Yes, it’s great if you find somebody whose natural way of working is exactly in line with your own way of working, because that means you’ll work well together, but surely somebody whose natural way of working isn’t perfectly in line with yours but who manages to adapt themselves to it, and ends up enjoying it and giving just as much to it as they do with their original way of working, is actually more valuable to you in the long run? Those students are the ones who are going to be taking the risks – not the ones who blindly did the right thing without really knowing how, and don’t really know any other way.

If the audition process was a spatial awareness test and not an acting test, then at my imaginary drama school I would put the students in a room and tell them to remember where the door was, before blindfolding them, spinning them around, and asking them to point to it. At GSA, they wouldn’t bother telling you to remember the door, they would just blindfold you without telling you anything and spin you around and then ask you to point to the door; some people would naturally have remembered the layout of the room and visualised it turning around them as they span, and therefore would be able to remember where the door was, because that’s just what those people are like. Others would not have remembered and wouldn’t be able to point to the door with any level of accuracy.  But if everybody had been told to remember where the door was before being blindfolded, then some of those students who might have otherwise failed to remember where it was would have been able to remember, even though it wasn’t their original instinct to do so. Those students are the ones who would be hungry to learn and quick to adapt to new ideas, which would be things that I would like to see in my applicants if I was running a drama school.

If that didn’t make any sense (and it might not have done), then I’m sorry about that.

Anyway, I had planned to go on at this point and continue on to the movement workshop and explain why that was also patronising and tried too hard to be different, but I think I’ve probably bored you enough with the first part of this, and I don’t want to risk repeating some of the same points that I made earlier. So I’ll sum up my main experience of that second workshop in three words:

Angles, ambiguous, peculiar.

Yeah it was a weird workshop.

So yes, I probably won’t be heading back to GSA any time soon, as only one minute after the post-lunch spiel of “just because you’re not right for GSA doesn’t mean you’re not right for another school” the list of successful first-round auditionees had been read out, and my name hadn’t made the list.

To be honest with you, it’s no great loss to me. But as you might have guessed, the day did manage to annoy me quite a lot…

Sorry if I’m sounding grumpy by the way – this is my mindset as of approximately three or four weeks ago that I am describing here, and I will eventually get to how I am right now; but first, LAMDA…

There isn’t really much to say here to be honest, except that I was bitterly disappointed when I got the rejection (via email, just moments after the post had arrived – hah, there I was thinking that I would have to wait another twenty-four hours to find out…). But it was, indeed, a “no”, and if it wasn’t my interview that let me down then I don’t know what it could have been, unless they’d already got too many people like me in the second round or something like that. My audition speeches were genuinely as good as I’ve ever done them, so I can’t fault myself much there, really.

So with that email, my attempt at drama school 2012 was done. Finished.

Game over.

And I had really tried to tell myself that I would be able to brush it off, that I could just go straight off to university and then take things from there, and that I should just follow the plan. But somehow things are never quite that simple, are they?

I didn’t rush the decision. It did take me a while to think about it, get other people’s opinions (which I really did value, by the way, so thanks, those people), weigh things up and figure it out. But I came to the conclusion that I still want to be an actor more than anything else at all, that drama school is far and away the best way of achieving that goal, and that I do (somewhere deep down, maybe) have the ability to get in to a top drama school.

I just think that 18 is a bit too young to give up, to be honest.

Yes, my parents weren’t thrilled (understandably), but after a while they came round to the idea and realised that it’s what I want to do. No, the effort that they put into my education was not a waste. I am thrilled to bits that I went to the schools that I did and got the grades I did, because not only will that prove very helpful for getting jobs, but it’s also helped shape me as a person. But acting is what I want to do, and I’m not prepared to throw in the metaphorical towel just yet. They understand now, and I’m happy about that. I’ve just got to push onwards and upwards now until next year’s auditions, I guess.

So yes, to sum things up, there’s been a bit of a change in the weather since the last time I posted here. The sun is out, my Dad’s mowing the lawn, I’m walking around in a t-shirt for the first time since about October and I’m now going to actually really try and be an actor. Because I’ve realised that I really can’t have a repeat of the last nine months or so, when I focused in specifically on drama schools and missed out on the bigger picture. I want to take courses, I want to do actual acting, whatever it may be. Yes, I did plays this year at my theatre group/youth theatre, but I’ve been doing that for seven years! I will keep doing those things, but I also want to move forward a bit, I want to try different things too.

I want to dip my toes in the real world of acting, and theatre/film as a whole, not just to make me seem a more attractive prospect to the drama schools, but also to help me develop as an individual interested in the performing arts in general.

So it’s now approaching summer, and I’m looking for a front of house job at a theatre. A nice bit of experience to have, I think (ok, it’ll probably be deathly boring but I’m definitely willing to give it a shot – it could be useful, after all). I’m also going to be one of several thousand people in the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, which will be interesting, so I’ll keep you posted on that if anything of note happens.

But most noteworthy of all, is the intriguing news that I am going to be touring in a play for two months from the end of August!

Ok, it’s theatre-in-education, TIE for short, so it’s not quite the same as actually touring a real proper play to real proper adults visiting real proper theatres. But it’s still touring a play – which I think will be a fantastic thing to be able to say I have done, and a great bit of experience to get under my belt. And I have pretty much the main part in it, which is pretty awesome actually, even if, as I said, it’s not quite the same as a “normal” play.

And hell, it’s paid, which makes it a very attractive proposition to me right now.

So anyway, that should pretty much have brought you up to date with things. I apologise an absurd amount for the ridiculous length of this post, but I had a lot to say, and it’s been a while. I promise the next post will be shorter, funnier and more interesting.

But enough from me; go and enjoy the weather – the sun’s shining again, and I don’t know about you, but I for one am planning to make the most of it.

Drama School 2012 Mission Log - Entry 5: LAMDA

LAMDA: I’m struggling to think of a clever way to start this entry, so I’ll cut to the chase.

I think my audition at LAMDA was very good. Sort of.

As I walked out of Baron’s Court Station and down Talgarth Road I couldn’t help but feel a warm smile slowly spreading across my face as memories of my two weeks spent there the summer before came back to me. I don’t really know if this is what people mean when they say that a place “feels right” for them… With me and LAMDA, there are two possibilities: 1) the place always felt right to me, which is why I did my summer course there and became more comfortable with the surroundings, meaning that I now enjoy time spent there even more, or 2) I only like it because I spent two weeks there in the summer, and the connection I feel with it is only down to familiarity and nothing more meaningful than that. Thinking back now, I can’t really tell which of the two it was.

Though to be honest, does it really matter either way? The point is that I felt comfortable walking into the building, more comfortable than I did at any of the other schools by a long stretch (and no I’m not just ignoring RWCMD because they rejected me). As if that wasn’t enough to get me pumped up about the audition, that morning I had been fortunate enough to take part in a Q&A session with the actor Gethin Anthony who happened to have gone to LAMDA, so that served to focus my mind even more on the task ahead of me.

So I went into the building (managing to do a good impression of a gorilla by violently rattling the door several times as I tried to open it, before realising I had to push a button to get it to release) and was met by a lady who ticked me off on a piece of paper she had in front of her. We made small talk for a bit (I tried to seem nice and amiable and probably failed), before being taken to the common room area by a student, accompanied by three other auditionees who all looked about my age. The student left us alone for a bit and the usual audition chat took place about our speeches and where we had travelled from and so on (not instigated by me, I might add – I’m not really a fan of using my audition prep time to discuss my Tube journey…). When he returned, the student told me that I was actually in the time slot after that of the other three auditionees, and that I should wait around in the common room for a while until it was my time, which would be in about half an hour. Thankfully, the other people that were supposed to be in the same time slot as me didn’t turn up until just before the audition time, so I used the time to jump up and down and run around in the empty space of the common room, go over the start of my speeches and just generally warm up. (I also used quite a large chunk of the time to go to the toilet, but I didn’t think you needed to know that. But now I’ve said it anyway… I guess I could delete what I just wrote. But then I’d feel like I wasn’t giving an accurate portrayal of my day, which I guess is the whole point of this… Oh screw it, I’ll leave it in…)

When my time arrived, I walked with the student back to the main entrance area when another student, this time a girl, came and showed me to just outside the room I would be auditioning in. Of course, it happened to be the one bloody room that I only went into once during my whole two weeks there in the summer. Typical…

Anyway, I sat outside there for a bit, trying to make sure I stayed focused, before the girl told me that the panel were ready to see me now, and that I could either go straight in, or take a couple of minutes to prepare myself.

I took a couple of minutes to prepare myself.

When I decided that I was ready, the student told me that when I went into the room the panel would say hello to me and ask me what my two speeches were, before letting me perform the speeches in whatever order I wanted to, and then that would be it.

Now, I remember this aspect of LAMDA’s audition process being the absolute most intimidating thing ever last year, the fact that the panel barely spoke a word to me seeming really unhelpful in terms of relaxing my nerves etc. But having had a sort of “inside view” of the auditions (even to the small extent that I did), I now found the fact that they whistled through each audition a completely understandable necessity. I took comfort in knowing that I was well-acquainted with the sort of thing that the panel wanted to see in those few minutes, and that I had prepared well for giving my best in that short time allotted to me.

I took a very deep breath.

This was it. This was massive. This was my favourite place. This was where I did my course in the summer. This was where I felt like I had the best chance out of anywhere. I had to give it my best shot.

And so I started.

And it was good. I think it was, anyway. In fact, I felt that it went really well, overall. It was probably the best I can remember actually acting in an audition, now I think about it.

So I said thank you and left the room feeling like I had just won the lottery. There was a pretty insane grin on my face, anyway…

Actually, I think the student waiting for me outside was a bit freaked out by it.

But hopefully she wasn’t. She took me through to the main foyer area where I sat again for a while, looking at the various photos on the wall of past LAMDA productions and trying to make out the names of the people pictured in them. I was actually feeling really, really happy. I was back in my favourite school. I had just done what I felt was a very good audition, for me. I knew how to act in interviews by now. The hard bit was surely over, right?

Well.

To be honest with you, I think that this feeling of happiness was the problem. I’m not suggesting that I was unhappy to feel so comfortable in the school, and to have enjoyed my time there as much as I did. On the contrary, I think it helped me focus my pre-audition nerves and use them to my advantage (though only time will tell). The problem was that, whereas before my audition I felt comfortable in my surroundings while still feeling nervous, now I just felt comfortable in my surroundings without any nerves at all. It was a bizarre feeling, considering the situation.

I genuinely felt like I was just relaxing in my living room. And as you can probably imagine, this really wasn’t the best mental state to be in just before an important interview.

I mean, sure, I think I was pleasant enough to talk to, which is good I guess. But the problem was a lack of focus on my part. I think I just assumed that, like at RADA, I would be asked a few probing questions to which I could give my carefully prepared answers to, and feel satisfied. But those questions never came. They asked me about some factual things, like where else I was auditioning and so on, and then asked me what I was doing at the moment. I gave a brief outline of what I had been doing, omitting a few details, and left it at that really, expecting to then hear something a bit more challenging, perhaps along the lines of, “Who is your favourite actor?” or “Why do you want to come to LAMDA?” or something. But it didn’t happen.

That was it.

I left the room in a little bit of a haze, slightly confused as to how my interview could have passed in such a fashion. I think a big factor in my surprise was the fact that the previous year’s interview had included a question about the last piece of theatre I had been to see, which at least had offered something for me to get my teeth in to. But this year, I got nothing of the sort.

And I’ve spent the two weeks since the audition absolutely kicking myself, really.

At the time, I thought that I was being warmed up into the tricky questions – which would be my chance to get them interested – by being asked about what I was doing at the moment. But now I look back on it, that question was my chance to get them interested. And I just didn’t take it. I could have mentioned so many different things that would have been exciting and that showed my enthusiasm and dedication and passion and desire and drive...

But I missed my chance. Based on that interview, I may well have seemed like the most boring person in the world, compared to other people who took that chance and made themselves stand out. My failure to give them what they wanted to hear, which I know I could have done, might well just be the difference between getting a recall and not getting one. And now I’m kicking myself.

So I left LAMDA feeling a bizarre combination of ridiculously pleased and incredibly pissed off. It’s now been almost two weeks since the audition, so I’m expecting the result in the post any time now.

And I love the school so much, and it would really make me so genuinely thrilled to get a recall there, but right now, I honestly don’t know what that result is going to be.

So cross your fingers and your toes for me, please – I’m going to need it…

Drama School 2012 Mission Log - Entry 4: Guildhall

Guildhall: So, there I was. Two auditions at two of the best drama schools in the world with barely a day between them.

*Gulp*

Not to be fazed, however, I launched myself out of bed on Tuesday morning at the adventurous hour of 6.45am, only to feel a bit light-headed and sit back down again. A few moments of pulling myself together, and confirming to my clearly befuddled brain that I was indeed awake pre-7am, allowed me to stand up once more and proceed with my morning ministrations.

I felt good. I had wanted to shake things up a bit after RADA and I reckoned that I had done, with a fresh take on the Shakespeare and some minor tweaks to the modern speech ensuring that I felt on my toes once more. One somewhat frustrating Tube journey later, in which I felt as if I walked the length of a half-marathon through underground tunnels between lines, I found myself at the Guildhall reception desk being directed up the stairs and told to follow the signs from there.

I was obscenely early.

But to be honest, I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. I was the second person there, and at least this way I got to feel a bit more comfortable in the building and make sure I planned routes to at least two toilets, in case one of them was being used (I find that easily-accessible toilets can prove vital on audition days…).

Once I had settled down a bit and more people had arrived, proceedings got underway. We were all given a number (I was “7” – a good sign? a magic number??) and then were split into groups and taken into separate rooms to complete a workshop, much the same as I remembered doing from the year before. The student who was telling us about the workshop let slip that we “weren’t being judged much – I mean, at all” at this stage of the audition… Hmm…

I was taking no chances and set about throwing myself into all the exercises that we were being asked to do. When he asked people to freeze and then said, “Three people move”, I moved. When he asked for a first “brave” volunteer, I volunteered. I didn’t want to seem pushy so made sure to hold back at times and let other people get in there first, but I certainly feel I showed myself as somebody willing to take risks, which I assume is what they’re looking for.

But, of course, we weren’t being judged at that stage, so I suppose it didn’t matter…

There was one man and one woman running the workshop and they told us that they would be the panel that we would be performing to later on. The man told us all that he was a director there, and then gave us some “advice” for our speeches, basically saying that they want to see “you” (whoever that is) and not “Richard with his hump” or somebody with a funny accent or something like that. Which I understand, but there was just something slightly funny in the way he said it. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I just thought it was a bit weird how much they emphasised that they don’t want to see a character, they just want to see you. Again, I do understand to an extent, that you can’t just be somebody completely removed from your experience and that you have to try and bring yourself to every part etc. etc., but there was something there that just felt a bit uninspiring to me. No other school really says that so explicitly as Guildhall do, and I got the sense that they would look down on me, say, making a point of adjusting my posture to help me as I became a different character, which just seems slightly weird to me. To me, at least, becoming somebody different (losing yourself in a combination of semi-conscious physical, vocal, intellectual and emotional decisions and shifts made just before and then during the course of the time in character) is what makes the whole thing exciting, but there you go.

Before we left the room we were also told that we should try and do our speeches while looking into the eyes of the panel because they like that. I was a bit thrown by this, as my speeches, especially the modern, rely quite heavily on some mental imagery I’ve put together for myself, and I felt that doing it to real faces that most certainly did not resemble the girl of my dreams (as required for the modern speech) would not be of much help to me. They told me, however, that I should just do my best to do it to their eyes anyway, so that was helpful…

Anyway, after the workshop was done we all sat back down in the room that we first arrived in and waited to be called up in the order of the numbers we had been given. A relatively long wait, then, for me at number 7, and I got chatting to another guy who was in my group who had the number 9. A lovely Irish guy who it turned out had been doing the RADA foundation course earlier this year and was now working in the bar there.

RADA, eh?…

RADA… Yes…

Mmmm… RADA…

RADA…

Mmmmmmm…

…

“NO! No dwelling on the past! Bad Harry! Back to the present!”

Sorry about that.

Eventually, my number was called and one of the students (a guy who I soon found out was aged 21 and in his first year of the BA course) took me out to the corridor to wait until I was called in to do the audition. He was an absolutely fantastic guy, really nice and friendly, who I ended up chatting quite a lot to as I wasn’t called in for some time. He had got in on his third year of applications and had got to the final round of LAMDA and had been offered a place at Rose Bruford, but chose Guildhall instead (unsurprisingly). I asked him about the whole “looking into the panel’s eyes” issue and he said that he would stand in for my characters and I could do my monologues to him, if I liked (to be fair, he had quite an attractive, clean-shaven face, so I felt it would be less of a leap to imagine him as a girl I fancied than a slightly podgy middle-aged lady…).

We went in to the room and I did my two speeches to the student – I felt that both went very well, if not absolutely magnificently – and then I sat down for my interview with the panel. Or at least I thought it was going to be an interview – they only asked me two questions: what I was doing at the moment and how my other drama school applications were going…

I left the room with a mouth that felt like the Sahara Desert with a hosepipe ban. I had a quick drink from the handy water fountain in the corridor (though the first time I tried to do this, the jet of water zoomed so viciously out of the tap that it went straight past my open mouth – it hit me on the chest so hard I think it might have actually left a bruise) before being led back in to the room we had been waiting in earlier. The nice student mentioned that he thought my speeches were very good and that he almost corpsed during my modern despite his insistence earlier that he definitely wouldn’t. I took that as a good sign, as the speech is meant to be funny as well as affecting, and I had felt at the time that I had got the affecting part down quite well so was pleased to hear that it was funny too.

Or maybe he was bullshitting me.

Either way, I was done now, and was definitely prepared to wait the half an hour required until the results were announced. I passed the time by figuring out how much money a school like Guildhall makes in audition fees each year. If the average audition fee is about £40 for a good school, and they have (as Guildhall did last year) 2,300 people auditioning, that comes to almost £100,000 each year! No wonder they charge for auditions – imagine how much money they’d lose out on if they didn’t!

Anyway, soon enough the panel appeared, announcing that there were to be three recalls out of the 12 or so of us in the room. I tried to relax and failed miserably. The three names were read out. I held my breath. None of them were mine. I breathed again.

Slight disappointment, true. Certainly not happiness. But acceptance.

I accepted their decision.

I have applied twice to Guildhall now. Neither time have I been given a recall. They operate a system by which you are only permitted to apply twice to the school before they shut you off and don’t let you try again. So that’s that, now. I will quite possibly never go there again in my life.

But to be honest with you, I’m not really all that bothered. I don’t think I was right for them, but equally as importantly, I don’t think the place was right for me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the building (I did, it was nice). I had a great experience with their students, as the guy who went into the audition room with me was fantastic. It’s actually something slightly deeper than that which jarred with me. I think that the panel said something that I can look back on now and understand much better than I did at the time.

(The following is really just a theory. It might well be completely wrong. I am presenting it to you because I think it might be of interest, but I do feel strongly that it would be foolish to take anything that I say next too much to heart, as it really represents only my opinion and not that of anybody else. Apologies if this becomes a bit verbose, but as you can probably tell by now, when I have something to say, I really do have something to say…)

The audition panel told us that they were ‘looking for something very specific, and just because you may not be right for Guildhall does not mean that you wouldn’t sail straight in to another drama school’. Now, on one level that could be read as simply trying to make people feel better when they don’t get a recall (as is statistically likely to happen), but I think there is definitely a certain element of truth to it. What I think Guildhall want, which differs from places like RADA and LAMDA, is for people to literally not act whatsoever. What I mean by that is that they want people to literally just speak as themselves, saying the words as they might say them, as themselves, in real life. I understand that idea, and I understand that saying things as yourself is basically what good acting is, but I also think that there is a limit to how much you can just be yourself and that you have to, at some point, try and bring something else to the table that is not just literally you speaking. I think there’s an art to acting, and also a technique, and I don’t think either of those things were what Guildhall were looking for in their auditions. They literally wanted to see ME speaking. I don’t think they wanted to see me change into somebody. They didn’t want to see the technique of a change in voice or posture or mannerisms or movement, no matter how natural it seemed. They didn’t care whether my speech was well-structured and pieced together. They didn’t even really want to see much emotion (and I’m not talking about emoting here, which is bad, I mean emotions as a natural by-product of the character’s objectives in relation to their given circumstances). I think they wanted me to just forget all pretences of acting and be another character in name only. They wanted to hear me talk to them, into their eyes, as me, which of course, wanting to play another character in another world, I didn’t do. I used their student who was willing to act the part with me, which helped me feel like I wasn’t in a room with an audition panel and that I really was a different person speaking to somebody about something that mattered to me, when in actual fact, what the panel wanted to see was me being me. They didn’t want me to use my life experience to inform my incarnation of somebody else. They didn’t want to see me change. They didn’t want to see a character. They wanted me to do that oh-so-difficult thing of just being me, Harry, telling somebody else’s story. But they didn’t want me to become a part of that story. They wanted the story to become a part of me.

Or at least, that’s how it felt to me. I might be completely wrong. I might be talking total rubbish and I just wasn’t good enough.

In fact, there’s a high chance that might well have been 475 words of total bollocks.

But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I got a recall at RADA with a similar type of audition to what I did at Guildhall. And that’s how I can tell myself that it doesn’t matter that Guildhall didn’t give me a recall, because I know that I may well have done much better if I auditioned like that at another school. And as an aside to back this up, the Irish guy who was on the RADA foundation course didn’t get a recall either. I think both of us were better suited to RADA than we were to Guildhall. This isn’t to say, by the way, that I think Guildhall’s own method of doing things is “wrong” or anything like that. On the contrary, they have turned out some incredible actors. But they go a different route to reaching that end point of “good acting” than some other schools do, and I guess, ultimately, I’m just not very well suited to that particular route. They’re looking for an incredibly open, blank canvas upon which they can build whatever they like (I don’t mean a boring person, or a stupid person, or an unemotional person, I mean somebody who is willing to let go of everything and finds it easy to go in any direction that is required of them). This isn’t to say that other schools don’t like that as well. But I have spoken to somebody who was at LAMDA and he told me that they don’t have a “LAMDA product” or anything like that, and that they really try and use what people already have and nurture that, rather than trying to build something completely new.

I think this is why Guildhall doesn’t let people apply more than twice. This is not really something you can learn to do. You either have the tendency to completely be yourself in that moment, or you don’t. With other schools you can do things like practise your speeches more and work on building up your connection with your characters and things like that. With Guildhall you get two shots; the only reason they don’t limit it to one is that you might have an off-day on that first audition so they need a second one to be absolutely certain that they made the right decision. With the other schools, it’s possible to do a lot to improve your chances as each year goes by. With Guildhall, it’s much, much harder, as they’re looking for something more instinctive, so they save both you and the school the bother of seeing you try and almost certainly fail once more by limiting you to two attempts.

Now, I don’t know at what point this audition report turned into a dissertation but I think it’s probably happened now, so apologies for making you read so much but I hope that it was of some interest at least. I always did find it harder to pin down exactly what it is that makes Guildhall tick than I did with any other drama school.

Anyway.

On my way out of the building I bumped into the student who had gone into the audition room with me. He said hello and that he was sorry I didn’t get a recall, which was nice of him, and that he thought I had some “stellar pieces” and that I shouldn’t worry. That cheered me up a bit, and gave me renewed hope for my now increasingly important date with LAMDA the next day.

So at the end of all that, I left Guildhall for quite possibly my last time ever with a smile on my face, even if it wasn’t for quite the reasons I might have hoped I would.

P.S. I have now since done my LAMDA audition and am currently waiting for the result in the post. I'm about to go away for a couple of days but when I get back I will write the report for that audition (which was certainly an interesting one), hopefully before I get their reply so that I'm not influenced by the result in any way when I'm writing. Anyway, speak soon...

On RADA and Other Things

Hi there.

Do you remember me?

I’m that dude who was writing that blog about drama school auditions.

You know, the blog with the ridiculously long posts that take forever to read.

I haven’t updated it in a while.

I’m sorry.

It’s just that it’s a bit of a bore trying to find something to write about a rejection letter, when there’s not much else to look forward to in the immediate future that could provide a nice ending paragraph of hopefulness and positivity to take the edge off it…

So yes, I got a “No” from RADA through my letterbox last Friday, which, in case you didn’t get my drift before, wasn’t entirely unexpected. It was a poor audition and quite frankly I would have been considerably taken aback if I had been given another recall, because I would have had to say to myself, “Why the HELL did I get another recall from RADA after a rubbish audition, if I thought I did quite well at RWCMD and got nothing out of it?” It would have been confusing to say the least. At least now, I know that I can get a recall, if I perform well. I don’t have to worry about somehow being given recalls for bad auditions and not getting them for good ones.

In other words, my mind feels much clearer now that I can see how and why I got rejected, which is most definitely a good thing.

When I opened the letter and read what it told me, oddly enough, I felt pretty unaffected by it – almost happy. It was certainly the least disappointed I’ve ever been after a rejection, which is surprising, considering it was the furthest that I’ve ever got to in any drama school audition process. I think I just thought that if I was rejected, at least I knew that I could have done better. If I had thought I had done brilliantly and then been rejected it would have felt a million times worse than this did. As it stands, I got rejected, I know why, and I can now tell myself quite clearly, “You did well to get a recall. You could have done better. You will do better in the future. Do not be disappointed with this rejection.”

I genuinely feel good right now. I don’t see what happened at RADA happening again. My mind feels clear and focused. As far as I’m concerned, last year was a trial run and doesn’t count; this year I’ve gone from getting nothing at RWCMD, to getting through one step at RADA, and if I continue the trend then I should make the final round at Guildhall and get offers from LAMDA and Guildford…

Hmm.

But wishful thinking aside, I do really feel like I’ve turned a corner. I know I’ve done the groundwork properly. I have two good, solid speeches (three, really) that are well put-together, contrasting and definitely make an impact. The magic ingredient that I was missing at RADA was spontaneity. I don’t mean that I think I should go into my next audition and start jumping on the spot as I do my speeches. I don’t even mean that I should find new and different emotions in them than I did before. I just mean that I need to make the thoughts and emotions that I have already worked on come spontaneously. They need to feel fresh. Not different, but fresh. In real life, if you feel upset about something it doesn’t feel boring, it feels intense and new and certainly not something you can properly expect or prepare for. That concept is the same for any emotion to a large extent, and I want to bring that to my auditions. The character does not plan to say what he says, and does not prepare to feel what he feels. It just happens.

This is why I am seriously considering spending a lot less time running my monologues in the week or so before the auditions. In fact I doubt whether I’ll run them much at all in that time, unless there’s something specific I need to sort out. It’s just that I know they are good and I want them to feel fresh. Not under-prepared, not particularly different, but fresh.

And that brings me on to the topic of when exactly I’m going to be putting this plan into action. Because the drama schools are so well-co-ordinated with one another and they work together to make things easier and less stressful for people, Guildhall and LAMDA have decided to put their two audition days literally right next to one another. Guildhall is on the 10^th April, LAMDA on the 11^th…

So that’s just brilliant. Oh well, at least I’ll have something to distract me if Guildhall give me a “no”…

But anyway, there’s a little while to go before my next encounter with a member of the Holy 21 schools. Until then, I have a theatre company to help set up, and a course with the National Youth Film Academy to be getting on with.

Not bad, eh? In fact, I’ve got a pretty good month ahead of me I think.

Though I’d swap everything for a place somewhere…

Drama School 2012 Mission Log - Entry 3: RADA Recall

RADA Recall: If nothing else, at least I’ll come out of all this in the knowledge that I did do at least a little bit better than last year.

Quite how much better I’m going to have done, though, remains to be seen, because after today I’m not entirely sure what to think.

After my initial excitement about the fact that I got a recall (for a change) wore off somewhat, I was left with a determination not to be a) cocky, b) too relaxed, or c) anxious to “up my game” in some way from what clearly worked the first time round, even though this was a recall. And I think (based on my reflections before I actually know the result) I succeeded, to an extent.

But I do think the key phrase there is “to an extent”.

I mean, I wasn’t cocky, I know that for a fact. I was pretty nervous about the whole thing and certainly wouldn’t describe myself as “relaxed”, so there was no chance of me going in there and thinking I could blag my way through it. And I had been telling myself constantly that there was no need to feel that I should try and do something drastically different from what I did before, because this second round is basically just another, slightly glorified, first round, to see if the original panel’s initial impressions were accurate or if it was a one-off. Seeing as I was pretty certain it wasn’t a one-off, because I had prepared thoroughly for my speeches, I said to myself that I should just go in and do what I did before, albeit with extra focus and attention to make sure I did it right (the Principal of RADA was on the panel, after all…).

“What could possibly go wrong?” I hear you cry. Actually, I don’t hear you, I’m sitting here on my own, at 11.10pm in my living room, and if a disembodied voice suddenly started speaking to me out of nowhere right now I’d probably shit my pants.

But anyway, working on the assumption that I asked myself that question, the answer is, “I’m not entirely sure”. It’s very hard to describe what I felt today. I woke up nice and early, I did everything by the book, got my preparation pretty much spot on, got there in plenty of time, read over my notes, etc. etc. But somehow, something just wasn’t quite right today. It wasn’t far off, but even from the moment I woke up, it just wasn’t quite there. Maybe it was because it was my first recall audition and it was having some sort of subconscious effect on me – like how a footballer sometimes plays worse when he gets called up for England for the first time than he does when he plays for his club, week in, week out, even though he just has to do the same thing that he does normally. Or maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to compare myself to a footballer, I don’t know…

I was the only person there when I arrived, but the girl who I mentioned in my post about the first RADA audition arrived a little while after me (didn’t I say I knew she’d get a recall?), which was nice, because it was good to have a friendly face there. But, annoyingly, while we were waiting to be called in, she recognised somebody who was walking through the entrance hall who she presumably hadn’t seen for quite some time, and proceeded to have a massive hug and “Hello!!” with them, which just served to remind me that I don’t know anybody at any drama school at all and that she, unlike me, had already been offered a place at a top drama school this year…

So that certainly didn’t help with psychologically preparing myself.

Anyway. I’m really struggling to find a way to describe how it felt, and this might not do the trick, but please bear with me – I’ll give it a go. Today, it felt like I was a lawnmower (bear with me, I said…); one of those power mowers that you have to pull the cord on to get it to start. It’s a pretty expensive mower, and it’s built well – all the parts work nicely, they’ve all been designed with fancy Mac laptops and oiled with WD40 Extra Smooth Glide or something – all in all, it’s a pretty handy machine, and naturally you’d expect it to do a good job of cutting your lawn. Now normally, when you want to start mowing, you pull the cord and the motor fires up. All the parts work perfectly and all the power inside the motor is delivered to all the correct components and it all works nicely and seamlessly, as it’s been designed to do. And you mow your lawn. Now imagine that one day you get your lawnmower, which is still really new-looking, with parts that mesh together really nicely and smoothly and which still work just as brilliantly as how they did when they were first designed and manufactured, and you try to mow your lawn with it. And you pull the cord, and the mechanism spins around inside, like it normally does when you pull the cord, but the motor just doesn’t kick in, for some reason. The cord pulls out fine, and the actual blades at the bottom of the lawnmower briefly turn as they usually do when you pull out the cord, but only for a second, because the engine just doesn’t want to start. Theoretically, you can still mow your lawn without the motor starting, because you have the power to turn the blades at what is still a pretty high speed by just quickly pulling the cord over and over again, and so that’s exactly what you do; you push the mower along your lawn while repeatedly pulling the cord to turn the blades at the bottom. And your grass does get cut.

But it’s not as easy as when the motor does it for you, and you can’t quite turn the blades at the same speed as the motor can, nor do so with the same level of consistency as with the motor. And you get to the end of your lawn and stop, and look back at what you’ve done, and you see that the grass has definitely been cut, and it doesn’t look too bad, but you’re sweating a lot, and your arm aches, and if you look closely there are little patches where the lawn hasn’t been cut as evenly as it would have been with the motor working, and it’s taken you a bit longer than it would have done normally, and just overall, despite your best efforts (and you haven’t done a bad job, considering you have no engine) it still just doesn’t look quite right.

That’s how I felt today. I’d put all the work in, I’d designed the framework and the mechanisms for doing well by practising my speeches and working them with the lovely lady I do them with and I felt confident that if I did them well it wouldn’t be a fluke, it would be down to my hard work. I wasn’t stabbing in the dark, I was following clearly laid tracks that I knew would lead me in the right direction, because I put a lot of effort into designing and working on them. In other words, I just needed some impetus, some kind of drive inside to utilise that framework as effectively as I could possibly utilise it. But for some reason, and maybe I’ll never know why, when I woke up today I just couldn’t feel it inside me. I know that sounds stupid but it’s the truth. I did everything I could to get it working: I ate a good breakfast, did a lot of walking and running around and hopping on the spot, I read over my notes and really tried to think about my characters and shouted stuff at myself in my head, but somehow it just wasn’t happening. It was like the real me was hiding inside, desperately trying to pump some kind of drive into me. I could feel him oiling the cogs and wheels inside me, putting all his effort into trying to get myself ready, and then when doing the speeches, pulling and pulling on the cord to get the gears turning as fast as he could, but it just didn’t quite catch in the same way as I know it can do when the motor really gets going by itself. He did his absolute best, and probably ended up creating a pretty passable imitation of what I can do when I’m working completely properly, but to me, a fairly seasoned examiner of my own ability, I know I can do a lot, lot better.

And that does suck, because this was a really big chance for me.

But I am not beating myself up about it too much. Why? Because I know there was nothing more I could have done. As I said before, I tried everything. I have experienced that feeling before when acting, admittedly not in quite such an important situation, and I know there’s often very little you can do to change it. I’m sure it happens to lots of people fairly regularly, and it just ended up happening to me today. If I had just accepted it and let myself be rubbish then I would be seriously kicking myself because I wouldn’t have been trying. But I was trying – I tried as hard as I could to get it going, and I think I made the best of a bad situation. The little version of me deep inside pulling on the cords and turning the gears did the best job he could have done with the limited resources available to him. He did have an excellent lawnmower available to him and he did a decent job of mowing the lawn with it, even if the power to really make good use of that mower tended to come in slightly frustrating fits and bursts as opposed to in a nice, constant stream. And I know for certain that I’m not making all this up as an excuse because barely an hour after I got out of there, I felt completely normal again! All day since then I have felt the same as how I felt yesterday. I have felt normal. And it was through no conscious effort of mine that I got back to feeling normal again – it just happened. There was nothing else I could have done to make it happen any sooner, and as such I can’t give myself stick about it not quite happening in the audition room. I did the best I could.

Thankfully, though, the audition wasn’t just two pieces. There was an interview as well, and a song, and to start with the former, I felt like I did give a pretty good account of myself when I sat down to chat to them. This being a recall audition, and there being two extra panellists compared to last time, there were more questions for me to answer than before, so it’s just as well I spent so long preparing for the interview. Lots of smiling, lots of eye contact (not weirdly so, I hope…) and LOTS of positivity and enthusiasm about everything. I have trained myself to do this now, and as it’s what I did in the first round, it must have worked to an extent, seeing as I found myself sitting there in a recall audition today. I talked about the play I’d seen recently (the same as I did in the first round, but in slightly more detail this time), I talked about what I was up to at the moment and what my plans were, I talked about what my other interests were (football, French and biology, apparently) and I talked about my speeches. I think I picked up on a slightly cheeky “catch-him-out”-style question when I was asked if I had read the plays and where I found my modern monologue (“in an audition book?”). NO! NEVER AN AUDITION BOOK!!! If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that you never say you found it in an audition book. Now, I won’t lie, it was from an audition book (which is maybe why they asked, because it’s probably quite a commonly used speech), but that wasn’t for lack of trying to find one in a play somewhere. It’s damn difficult to find a good speech; I’ve spent hours and hours trawling through plays at French’s and the National Theatre Bookshop and I certainly wouldn’t have gone with this one if I didn’t feel like it was absolutely perfect for me, which it definitely is. But no, I told them I read the play first, which was fine anyway because I knew I could answer questions on the play because since finding the speech I have read the play a couple of times over and know it quite well.

But anyway. Overall the interview went very well. I reflected afterwards that I probably wouldn’t have traded my good interview for doing my monologues better, because I felt like I did make a fairly good impression, which I think is important (of course it would have been great to have good monologues and a good interview, but oh well…). As I say, I was pretty happy with this aspect of the audition.

And then, finally, the song. Now, I don’t like singing all that much. I’m not bad I guess, but I’m definitely not great. Thankfully my song is a fun song to do and I enjoy doing it, but again the numbness I felt earlier with the speeches came back to me with the song. I just didn’t quite give it everything that I know I can give it. But I didn’t fluff any notes and I think I got the ending pretty much right, which is important, and it wasn’t bad overall, I guess. But, rather like the speeches, just not incredible.

I left the room and sort of slumped against a wall for a moment. I felt physically drained. I genuinely did feel like there had been somebody inside me working their arse off to try and make things happen, and by the time it was over I had been left pretty exhausted somehow. The nice girl asked me how it went and I said it was ok (which was about the best reply I could muster) but that I really wasn’t sure, which was true. She had mentioned earlier that she thought her first round audition hadn’t been great and that she was really surprised when she got a recall, and reminded me now of that, and that I shouldn’t think about it too much because sometimes you think you’ve done well and you haven’t, and vice-versa. Of course, her version (her, now officially soon-to-be-Acting-Student-of-Drama-Centre version) of “not doing that great” is probably my equivalent of acting my heart out, but oh well.

I can’t say for certain whether I did or didn’t get another recall. It wasn’t clear cut to me, which I think is a good thing, at least. There’s a possibility there that it went a bit better than I thought. One thing that’s true for these auditions is that you never know for sure, I guess. But my performances just could have been a bit more effective than they ended up being, that’s all.

Anyway, that was that: my first recall, gone forever. It’s a two-week wait now before I find out if I got through to the third round, but as far as I’m concerned, my next audition is for Guildhall on the 10^th April, followed swiftly by LAMDA on the 11^th. RADA is history now – I think it’s best to think of it that way for the time being.

But I’ll look back on today and know that I tried my hardest. It might not have come off 100% but there was nothing more, on the day, that I could have done.

I think I should just be happy that I got a recall, really. It was a nice feeling.

A REAL update about RADA

It appears the gods have answered my cries (maybe they read this blog?)

After many long days of waiting, my reply from RADA regarding my first round audition came in the post today. The same envelope that I had sent off to them with my application, now containing one solitary, thin letter (don’t people say that if the envelope is thick then it’s a recall, if it’s thin it’s a rejection?…) was perched upon my doormat.

Bizarrely, despite the fact that I had to attach a stamp to the envelope they still felt the need to mark it with their own franking machine anyway. I could have saved myself 36p…

Funnily enough, though, that wasn’t what was occupying the majority of my attention as I looked at the letter. Frustratingly, this was the one day of the week that my Mum wasn’t at work in the morning and as such it was her that found the letter first on the doormat and gave it to me – I could feel her metaphorically peering over my shoulder as I opened it, which was annoying, but at least physically speaking I had shut myself in the kitchen so nobody could sneak up behind me and see. It’s a pretty personal thing and I hate the feeling of having to share it with people without having a chance for the result, whatever it may be, to sink in first.

I stalled for time by firstly opening another letter that was sent to me (I receive nothing in the post for weeks, and then two things come at once??), before, finally, I could put it off no longer. All manner of things were running through my head. I have managed, over the past few days, to distinguish RADA from the other drama schools in my mind (mainly as a way to stop myself thinking about the result so much) and have been telling myself that RADA “doesn’t count” as one of the drama schools that I am auditioning for and that to receive a rejection from them shouldn’t affect the rest of my applications or the way that I think about them, i.e. because RADA is so much higher in terms of numbers of applicants it should be treated as an entirely separate venture to the rest of them, and that I should try and focus on the other schools for the time being, if you get my drift. I told myself that LAMDA was where I was going to focus on and that it shouldn’t affect my LAMDA application or the way I thought about it or prepared for it if I was rejected by RADA…

But none of that really helped.

Anyway, I opened the letter…

…

…

I GOT A RECALL!!!

At the eighth time of asking, I finally got a recall somewhere! And at RADA too! I’m not completely useless! Woohoo!!!

Anyway, I mustn’t get too excited, for two main reasons: 1) even if I get TWO MORE recalls from RADA I’d still have to pass the final round, so there’s a LONG way to go, and 2) I’ve got to get preparing, because my recall is exactly one week away today!

So as I say, I’d better get practising – especially as they ask for a song this time…

Now THAT’S gonna be interesting…