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 10th April, followed swiftly by LAMDA on the 11th.
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.
